Tasmania’s colonial years

This was a short textbook for primary schools. It was one of those annoying books where you’re commissioned to write it, and you go to some trouble, and then the publishers change it so much it’s hardly recognisable. 

I tried to write what I thought children would be interested in. For example, I had a story of a teenage girl on a country farm who was alone with an employee who cut himself badly. She bound up the cut with spider web, all she could find. The wound healed fine. The publisher cut this out and put in a boring story of potato production. Perhaps they thought the spider web was a bad example to modern children? But they’d hardly reach for it instead a bandaid.