The first of Western Australia’s 9,000 or so adult convicts were not transported there until 1850, but 234 boys from the Parkhurst Reformatory, on the Isle of White, had been sent to the colony in the 1840s. Classified as ‘Government Juvenile Immigrants’, they became apprentice settlers. Among them was fifteen-year-old John Gavin, the first European to be executed in Western Australia. David Hutchison’s novel Many Years a Thief evokes the crime from the perspective of the fair-minded government guardian to the boys, John Schoales, who, wracked by guilt, begins an investigation that will, in turn, bring about his ruin.