Bass Coast Post
  • Home
    • Recent articles
  • News
    • Point of view
    • View from the chamber
  • Writers
    • Anne Davie
    • Anne Heath Mennell
    • Bob Middleton
    • Carolyn Landon
    • Catherine Watson
    • Christine Grayden
    • Dick Wettenhall
    • Ed Thexton
    • Etsuko Yasunaga
    • Frank Coldebella
    • Gayle Marien
    • Geoff Ellis
    • Gill Heal
    • Harry Freeman
    • Ian Burns
    • Joan Woods
    • John Coldebella
    • Julie Paterson
    • Julie Statkus
    • Kit Sleeman
    • Laura Brearley >
      • Coastal Connections
    • Lauren Burns
    • Liane Arno
    • Linda Cuttriss
    • Linda Gordon
    • Lisa Schonberg
    • Liz Low
    • Marian Quigley
    • Mark Robertson
    • Mary Whelan
    • Meryl Brown Tobin
    • Michael Whelan
    • Mikhaela Barlow
    • Miriam Strickland
    • Natasha Williams-Novak
    • Neil Daly
    • Patsy Hunt
    • Pauline Wilkinson
    • Richard Kemp
    • Sally McNiece
    • Terri Allen
    • Tim Shannon
  • Features
    • Features 2024
    • Features 2023
    • Features 2022
    • Features 2021
    • Features 2020
    • Features 2019
    • Features 2018
    • Features 2017
    • Features 2016
    • Features 2015
    • Features 2014
    • Features 2013
    • Features 2012
  • Arts
  • Local history
  • Environment
  • Nature notes
    • Nature notes
  • A cook's journal
  • Community
    • Diary
    • Courses
    • Groups
    • Stories
  • Contact us

What happened to Freddy and Rex

19/5/2017

0 Comments

 
PictureAuthor Joe Fairhurst
By Catherine Watson

A PRIVATE home for boys, a callous superintendent, two dead boys and links to the shadowy world of eugenics … it sounds like the stuff of a thriller.

​But they are the elements of a harrowing true story that journalist Joe Fairhurst uncovered in his quest to find out what happened to the two boys, who died horribly at Newhaven on Phillip Island, 11-year-old Freddy in 1926 and 10-year-old Rex in1933.

Joe came across the story in 1996 while working for The Age. He could not have guessed that 21 years later he would still be working on it, trying to fill in the last few pieces of the jigsaw.
 
In conversation with his film-maker son, John, he will reveal all next month at the Phillip Island Literary Festival.
 
Joe told part of the story in his one-act play, The Killings at Newhaven, which won the 2009 Lyrebird Award. A reading of the two-act version will be performed at the Peridot Theatre in August. Joe is also working on a book about the killings.
 
He says he continues to uncover new information, much of it held in archives, more than 80 years after the killings.

Literary Festival of Phillip Island, June 9-11. Buy tickets.  
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.