Author(s): Philip Payton

Australiana

In the 1840s Cornish miners and their families came pouring into South Australia to take their part in the new colony’s great copper boom. They came to lend their home-grown expertise to extract the rich ore that gave South Australia a world-wide reputation as being the Copper Kingdom. These ‘Cousin Jacks’, as they were called, left Old Cornwall by the thousands when the news of the copper discoveries became known. Stepping ashore at Port Adelaide, they immediately set about putting such names as Burra, Kapunda, Moonta and Wallaroo firmly on the map of Australia. In a matter of only a few years they had created Cornish communities with the same traditions, the same mining prowess, the same piety and the same determination to adhere to their own identity, as the Cornish people they had left behind. Even after the end of immigration in the mid-l880s, the mines lived on and the Cornish traditions flourished. In this widely researched book, Philip Payton has recorded in words and pictures the human face of Australia’s early mining history.