Cornish Australians


Cornish Australians are citizens of Australia who are fully or partially of Cornish heritage or descent, an ethnic group native to Cornwall in the United Kingdom. They form part of the worldwide Cornish diaspora, which also includes large numbers of people in the US, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico and many Latin American countries. Cornish Australians are thought to make up around 4.3 per cent of the Australian population and are thus one of the largest ethnic groups in Australia and as such are greater than the native population in the UK of just 532,300.
Cornish people first arrived in Australia with Captain Cook, most notably Zachary Hickes, and there were some Cornish convicts on the First Fleet, James Ruse, Mary Bryant, along with several of the early governors. The creation of South Australia, with its emphasis on being free of convicts and religious discrimination, was championed by many Cornish religious dissenting groups and Cornish people comprised a sizeable proportion of settlers to that colony. Large scale Cornish emigration to Australia did not begin until the 1840s, coinciding with the Cornish potato famine and slumps in the Cornish mining industry. The gold rushes and copper booms were major draws on Cornish people, not just from Cornwall itself, but also from other countries where they had previously settled.
In recent years the story of the Lost Children of Cornwall, child migrants sent from Cornwall to Australia up until the early 1970s, has come under intense scrutiny. The practice of sending apparently unwanted or orphaned Cornish children abroad continued long after it had ceased, after being discredited, in other areas. It has been the subject of apologies by both the Australian and British prime ministers.

Number of Cornish Australians

A 1996 study by Dr. Charles Price gives the total ethnic strength of Cornish Australians as 269,500 with a total population of 768,100. This is made up by 22,600 of un-mixed origin and 745,500 of mixed origin and equates to 4.3 percent of the Australian population. This makes the Cornish the fourth largest Anglo-Celtic group in Australia after the English, Irish and Scottish, and the fifth largest ethnic group in Australia.
Approximately 10 percent of the population of South Australia, and over 3 percent of Australia as a whole, has significant Cornish ancestry. In the 1986 Australian Census 15,000 people reported their ancestry as Cornish, however, no figure from the 2006 Australian census has been published as to how many reported their ancestry as such in that year.
In 2011 a campaign was launched to increase the number of people writing in their Cornish ancestry on the 2011 Australian Census.

Culture

Festivals

The Cornish who moved to Australia brought with them many festivities and holidays. The most important being at Christmas and Midsummer.
The Kernewek Lowender, held biennially since 1973 in the South Australian towns of Moonta, Kadina and Wallaroo, is the largest Cornish festival in the world, attracting tens of thousands of visitors each year.
There have been four Cornish festivals held in the City of Bendigo since 2002. The most recent was held at Eaglehawk in March 2010 and was entitled 'Welcome Back Cousin Jack'.

Food and drink

like the Cornish pasty remains popular in Australia. Former premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, once took part in a pasty-making contest. Swanky beer and saffron cake were very popular in the past and have been revitalised by Kernewek Lowender and the Cornish Associations.
In the 1880s Henry Madren Leggo, whose parents came from St Just, Cornwall, began making vinegar, pickles, sauces, cordials and other grocery goods based on his mother's traditional recipes. His company, now known as Leggo's, is wrongly believed by many to be Italian.
Angove Family Winemakers, formerly Angove's, was founded by Dr W.T. Angove, a Cornish doctor who migrated to South Australia with his family in 1886. He planted vines in the outer Adelaide suburb of Tea Tree Gully, though 125 years on most of its wines are based on Riverland grapes. They have recently started producing wines from their new vineyard purchased in 2002 in McLaren Vale. The distribution company wholesales not only Angove wines and St Agnes Brandy but also Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne and a dozen other companies' wines and spirits.
Matt Wilkinson of Pope Joan in Brunswick East, Melbourne, won the Southern Final of the Great Australian Sandwichship in 2011 with his lunch roll The Cornish which won an award in its category.

Language

The Cornish language is spoken by some enthusiasts in Australia.
Members of the Gorsedh Kernow make frequent visits to Australia, and there are a number of Cornish Australian bards.
South Australian Aborigines, particularly the Nunga, are said to speak English with a Cornish accent due to the fact that they were taught English by Cornish miners. Most large towns in South Australia had newspapers at least partially in Cornish dialect. At least 23 Cornish words have made their way into Australian English, these include the mining terms fossick and nugget.

Literature

Not Only in Stone by Phyllis Somerville is the story of emigrant Cornishwoman, Polly Thomas, who faces many trials and tribulations in the pioneering era of South Australia. The book won the South Australian Centenary novel award in 1936.
Kangaroo is D. H. Lawrence's semi-autobiographical novel based on his wartime experiences in Cornwall and subsequent visit to Australia.
D. M. Thomas is an internationally renowned Cornish author who spent part of his childhood in Australia, drawing upon his experiences in his work.
Rosanne Hawke is an award-winning author of children's books from Kapunda in South Australia.
Bruce Pascoe, who challenged the colonial historical narrative in , has both Cornish and Australian Aboriginal roots.
The Gommock. Exploits of a Cornish Fool in Colonial Australia. is a historical novel by Marie S. Jackman based around the lives of a Cornish emigrant miner Yestin Tregarthy and his wife Charlotte, set at the Burra Burra copper mine in South Australia.
Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick White wrote many novels with Cornish characters and themes. His fifth novel, Voss, includes a character named Laura Trevelyan. A Fringe of Leaves portrays Cornishwoman Ellen Roxburgh née Gluyas shipwrecked on an island and living amongst the aboriginal population.
The celebrated Australian poet John Blight's ancestors arrived in South Australia on the Lisander, in 1851. In the 1987 recording John Blight he describes his Cornish background and its influence on his style.
A true life character was George Hawke. He spent his early life working as a wool stapler for the Allanson family. He was born in St Eval Parish on 2 October 1802 at his father's farm near Bedruthan. Following losses in an economic recession, George decided to emigrate to Australia. His words were recorded in a letter at age 70 years to a nephew back in Cornwall. The letter was later reproduced in full in Yvonne McBurney's book, The Road to Byng.

Art

was a miner and cartoonist, born in Moonta and remembered for his humorous depictions of the lives of Cornish miners. Collections of his work include:
Roger Kemp – Abstractionist Painter

Music

Christmas carols are still traditionally sung in parts of Australia, just like in Grass Valley, California. Cornish Australians have a place in the transnational Cornish carol writing tradition. The Christmas Welcome: A Choice Collection of Cornish Carols, published at Moonta in 1893, was one of several such collections published between 1890 and 1925 from Polperro to Johannesburg. The Cornish also used to decorate their houses with greenery for Christmas, a tradition that was transported with them to Australia.
Cornish male voice choirs and brass bands were once a popular part of Cornish Australian culture, but this has waned somewhat.

Religion

Many Cornish settlers in Australia were Methodist and many chapels were built in the places that they settled. Others were Anglican, while few were Roman Catholic. Their Methodism was a badge of distinctive Cornishness and also gave them their trade unionist convictions. Most of the 22000 Wesleyan Methodists, 6000 Primitive Methodists and more than 6000 Bible Christians in South Australia in 1866 were Cornish.

Sport

There has been much involvement of Cornish Australians in sport over the years. Many playing rugby and cricket at an international level. This has led to the Cornish chant of "Oggie, Oggie, Oggie, Oi, Oi, Oi," taken on by all Australians as "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie."
The Cornish took some of their own sports with them to Australia. Cornish wrestling matches were a regular occurrence, held at festivities throughout the year, particularly Midsummer, Easter and Christmas. Thousands attended these contests, which were sometimes spread over several days and with wrestlers representing different mining regions.

Politics

The Cornish miners founded the first trade unions, and were instrumental in the formation of the Australian Labor Party. The first Labor party minority government in Tasmania was led by premier John Earle. The first Labor party majority government in South Australia was led by premier John Verran, a Cornishman from Gwennap. The first Labor party majority government in Western Australia was led by premier John Scaddan, a Cornishman from Moonta. Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party of Australia in 1944.

Heads of Government

Prime Ministers

Two of Australia's prime-ministers and one Acting prime Minister are known to have Cornish ancestry.
Fourteen state premiers are known to have strong Cornish connections. At least six Premiers of South Australia, and four Premiers of Western Australia, have been of Cornish descent or birth.

, 10th Premier of Western Australia
, 18th Premier of Western Australia
, 18th Premier of Tasmania
South Australia
Western Australia
, 33rd Premier of Victoria
Queensland
There have been many other Australian politicians of Cornish birth or descent. Some of these are listed below, starting with perhaps the most important, Sir John Quick, Founding Father of the Australian Federation.
, Founder of Melbourne
, Labor's first female parliamentary member
, journalist and important figure in the early Australian Labour movement
, instrumental in founding the Australian Labor Party in Western Australia.

Early settlers

During the 18th century many Cornishmen were employed by the Royal Navy. People like Admiral Edward Boscawen and Edward Pellew, conscious of their Cornish identity, recruited heavily from their fellow Cornishmen. Samuel Wallis, from Lanteglos-by-Camelford, was one of Boscawen's protégés and the first European to discover Easter Island and Tahiti in 1767. Cornish naval officers played a major role in the early years of the Australian colony.

Governors

After its founding in 1788 two of the first governors of the New South Wales colony were Cornish.
Philip Gidley King – 3rd Governor, who arrived on the First Fleet as First Lieutenant in Captain Phillips' ship. One of those who went ashore to look for water, he had his first encounter with the Aborigines, offering them beads and mirrors. Botany Bay proving a disappointment, King recommended the location at Port Jackson as an alternative. Ralph Clark, an officer of Marines, compared the new location with the River Tamar in Cornwall, 'I cannot compair any think to come nearer to it than about 3 miles above Saltash on the Wair.' King and 22 others were sent to colonise Norfolk Island. This eventually came to nothing and the island was abandoned in 1806. After a traumatic time on the island King went back to Britain to recuperate, leaving Nicholas Nepean, from Saltash, in charge. He returned in November 1791 and in 1800 he became governor of New South Wales. In 1803 he ordered the occupation of Van Diemen's Land as a convict settlement, there he founded Launceston named after the town of his birth.
William Bligh – 4th Governor, most famous as the victim of the Mutiny on the Bounty, he was also unfortunate enough to be the victim of a coup d'etat at the hands of the infamous Rum Corps on 26 January 1808. He had tried to rein them in, something King had failed to do, but instead spent the next two years in exile on Van Diemen's Land while the colony was ruled by a military junta. He returned in 1810 when Lachlan Macquarie was appointed as governor. Shortly afterwards he left Australia for good.
Sir George Arthur – Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land, now the State of Tasmania, 1823–1837. At the time Van Diemen's Land was the main British penal colony and it was separated from New South Wales in 1825. It was during Arthur's time in office that Van Diemen's Land gained much of its notorious reputation as a harsh penal colony. He selected Port Arthur as the ideal location for a prison settlement, on a peninsula connected by a narrow, easily guarded isthmus, surrounded by shark-infested seas. He failed in his attempts to reform the colony and the system of penal transportation with Arthur's autocratic and authoritarian rule leading to his recall. By this time he was one of the wealthiest men in the colony. He returned to Britain in 1837.

Convicts

On the First Fleet 21 Cornish convicts arrived in Australia aboard the Charlotte and Scarborough in 1788. A further twelve were sent in the Second Fleet of 1790, though six died on the way, and sixteen were carried on the Third Fleet of 1791. Some 600 convicts were transported from Cornwall to Australia between 1787 and 1852, 78 per cent of whom were male. Some of the most famous of these included:

Mining

The greatest waves of Cornish immigrants to Australia came to mine various minerals including copper, silver and gold. Some of the greatest areas of Cornish settlement are listed below. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries over a third of the Cornish workforce was employed in the mining industry. A mixture of famine and collapses in the mining industry in their native Cornwall forced many thousands of Cornish people to leave their homes from the 1840s. However their skills in hard-rock and metalliferous mining were so sought after that tens of thousands more were sent for over the following decades to build the growing Australian mining industry. This was added to during the gold-rushes, when even more Cornish arrived to seek their fortune.

South Australia

Samuel Stephens became the first adult colonist to put foot on South Australian soil when he landed at Nepean Bay on 27 July 1836. He was followed by hundreds of other Cornish people over the following five years. His brother, John Stephens, was active in promoting the new colony within Britain, publishing his book, The Land of Promise, in 1839.
Ten percent of the South Australian population has significant Cornish ancestry. Cornish surnames are more heavily concentrated in South Australia where six of the top ten surnames are Cornish.
Internationally renowned Cornish author D. M. Thomas, who spent part of his childhood in Melbourne, visited the town of Truro, South Australia in the late 20th century. There, he found that, "Cornwall seemed close... Cornish miners had come in droves in the last century, and played a large part in founding the state. A High School class to which I read and talked had three children with solidly Cornish names, who knew all about their ancestry."
In its heyday Moonta was South Australia's second largest town after Adelaide and was predominantly settled by Cornish miners and their families. Today it is known as 'Australia's Little Cornwall'. Along with the other principal towns of Kadina and Wallaroo in the northern Yorke Peninsula this mining area became known as the Copper Triangle and was a significant source of prosperity for South Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today Moonta is most famous for its traditional Cornish pasties and its Cornish style miner's cottages and mine engine houses such as Richman's and Hughes engines houses built in the 1860s. Many streets and houses have Cornish names. Many descendants of these Cornish families bearing their Cornish surnames still live in the Copper Triangle and the area is intensely proud of its Cornish heritage. Many of the original miners cottages made from wattle and daub still stand and are still lived in by local residents. Many Cornish subsequently left the area during the Victorian and Western Australian gold-rushes.
Copper was discovered in Kapunda in the 1840s, coinciding with the Cornish potato famine which led to many Cornish people emigrating to the town.
Copper was discovered at Montacute, in the Adelaide Hills, soon after Kapunda, and Cornish miners were in the forefront of this development.
The Burra mine, or 'the Monster' as it was colloquially known, acted like a magnet to the Cornish in Australia. Discovered in 1845, it proved to be an incredibly rich mine, sparking a new wave of immigration to South Australia. The main township is called Redruth after Redruth in Cornwall.

Victoria

The Cornish played an important role in the development of the Victorian goldfields.
, Victoria, Australia
In 1881 46.9 percent of fathers and 41.4 percent of mothers in Bendigo were born in Cornwall. This was in addition to those Cornish who were born in Australia or places as far afield as Mexico or Brazil. The Cornish in Bendigo outnumbered the combined strength of their Irish and Scottish counterparts.
Along with Bendigo, Ballarat was one of the major Cornish mining settlements in Victoria. Many Cornish settled in Geelong, especially after the decline of the gold-fields.

New South Wales

Many Moonta and Bendigo Cornish took up mining in Broken Hill. The Cornish presence in Broken Hill was bolstered by Cornish American miners from Nevada, who brought with them better technology for working in the silver-lead sulphide deposits.

Western Australia

There were Cornish mining copper in Western Australia from the 1840s, but this was increased with the discovery of gold.
Once the third largest town in Western Australia, Coolgardie attracted the Cornish during the 1890s to mine gold.
The city of Kalgoorlie with Boulder attracted great numbers of Cornish both from within and outside Australia, due to their extensive goldfields.
Cornish miners worked at the Geraldine mine in Western Australia and the nearby town of Northampton. Their produce was shipped out of Port Gregory, Western Australia in small vessels like the tramp steamer SS Xantho and then transhipped to the port of Geraldton where it was loaded onto wool ships bound for England as a form of 'paying ballast'.

Cornish associations

There are many Cornish associations in Australia, as there are around the world. The Cornish Association of South Australia is the oldest, being run continuously since 1890. Others include The Cornish Association of Bendigo and District, The Cornish Association of New South Wales, Southern Sons of Cornwall inc., The Cornish Association of Queensland, The Cornish Association of North Yorke Peninsula, The Cornish Association of Tasmania, The Cornish Association of Victoria, and The Cornish Association of Western Australia.

Names

There are many names of businesses and places in Australia that are named after Cornish people and places.

Businesses

Named after Cornish places

Places named after Evan Nepean, a Cornish politician in the late eighteenth century. The name "Nepean" is thought to come from Nanpean, in Cornish:
Places named after Henry Dangar: