With Dawn
Pascoe, Steven Finnigan and Nick Candy
Blue Room
Theatre
17 April –
5 May
 |
| Nick Candy, Steven Finnegan and Dawn Pascoe (pic Matt Scurfield) |
John Gavin
was just 15 when, in April 1844, he became the first European executed in the
fledgling Swan River Colony. His short life was Dickensian: when he was only
11, he was transported with 28 other boys, “Parkhurst Apprentices”, to Western
Australia to serve a 10-year sentence for, we gather, some minor artful
dodgering. He’d been here four months when, in February 1844, he confessed to
the brutal murder of George Pollard, a son of the Pinjarra family to whom he
had been indentured. He was tried on April 3 that year and, two days later
(Good Friday intervened), hanged at the Roundhouse in Fremantle.
In an act
of gruesome kindness, the sheriff had weights tied to Gavin’s skinny legs so
the lad’s death pangs would be mercifully brief. His body was secretly buried
in a shallow grave in sandhills to the south of the Roundhouse.
Nick Candy’s
script recounts Gavin’s wretched story with few embellishments and scant
detail. He implies, but doesn’t effectively substantiate, doubt about the boy’s
guilt, but this seemed to me more for effect than purpose.
