Sometimes things just happen. And when a number of things just happen around the same time in the same place there can be unexpected outcomes. This book is about Australia in the 1870s. It involves a disastrous shipwreck, a young Irish woman named Eva Carmichael, a sheep and cattle farm, a rabbit plague and selectors — people who were allowed to set up farms on vacant government land. It tells the true story of how these were all tied together by telegraph wire. Halstead Press presents Paul Ashton’s series of short texts designed to integrate with the Australian Curriculum for Humanities and Social Sciences and English, each focussed on the role that accident and serendipity play in the past and making history. Each short story provides an opportunity for students to engage with history while improving their core language, research and critical thinking skills. They allow for students to understand how that history is not just something that can be found in textbooks, but rather that it is something which is constantly being made around them, and that they are creating their own histories every day. The stories are being written by Paul Ashton, a historian who has published ten history textbooks for Australian schools.
