Monday 16 May 2016
“Penryn is Nothing to Adelaide” Early Cornish Emigration to SA
Presented by Philip Payton, Professor of History, Flinders University.
In the first decade after the foundation of South Australia in 1836, thousands of men, women and children left Cornwall for the new colony. An intensive recruitment campaign in the late 1830s, when Cornwall was targeted as a source of likely recruits for South Australia, was complemented by the discovery of first silver-lead and then copper at Glen Osmond, Kapunda and Burra Burra. The ‘Reforming Thirties’ had promised religious and civic freedom in South Australia, as well as social and economic mobility. ‘The Hungry Forties’ drove the new arrivals from the potato blight and near starvation to Australia’s first mining frontier.
Professor Philip Payton is Professor of History at Flinders University as well as Emeritus Professor of Cornish & Australian Studies at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on Cornish and Australian subjects and his many books include titles such as The Cornish Overseas, and Making Moonta: The Invention of ‘Australia’s Little Cornwall’. His most recent book, Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia, is to be published shortly by Wakefield Press.
Record of Meeting
View the record of all past meetings which details all talks given at meetings by guest speakers since our foundation in 1980. Most meetings since 1985 have been recorded.
No. | * | B | T | d | doc | Date | Topic, Speaker, Detail |
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391 | 16/5/2016 | “Penryn is Nothing to Adelaide” Early Cornish Emigration to SAPresented by Philip Payton, Professor of History, Flinders University. In the first decade after the foundation of South Australia in 1836, thousands of men, women and children left Cornwall… |
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