Miss Carmichael and the Midshipman

Accidental Histories – exploring the role of accident and serendipity, to make history.

Accidental Histories is an exciting new Australian series by Professor Paul Ashton. Designed to integrate with the Australian Curriculum for Humanities, Social Sciences and English as well as aligning with state syllabuses, these titles also have teaching resources!

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.

Paul Ashton started his career as a high school teacher and ended up a professor of public history at the University of Technology Sydney. Miss Carmichael and the Midshipman is the second book in a series for children between the ages of 6 and 16.