This ambitious novel is laudable for highlighting the appalling conditions in which the boys were trans-ported, and for recreating that terrifying edifice, Round House Prison, with its ‘glare from the limestone’ and its ‘stench from the whalers’ trypots on the beach’. Many Years a Thief might have been even more persuasive as non-fiction: it lacks a certain historical actuality and strains against basic novelistic conventions. At times the dialogue is clunky, without bite; descriptions of social niceties – cups of tea and whisky in the drawing room – stultify a plot already blighted with exhaustive scenes in which Schoales strides from one place to another. Secondary characters, women especially, are tedious: Schoales’s sister, Elizabeth, ostensibly there only to worry about her brother’s health and to lament his lack of a wife, is fond of the irritating exclamation ‘John, that’s blasphemous’ at the mild-est provocation.

Buried within the story is its intriguing conduit, John Gavin; he is muted by the endless detail. In what is a vibrant and sometimes contentious period of historical reimaginings in Australian literature, it is a shame that this chapter in Western Australian history, unfamiliar to many, does not grip the reader.