Before The Mines: Early Cornish Emigration to South Australia

Not without reason, Cornish emigration to South Australia is generally associated with the development of the State's nineteenth-century copper-mining industry, and the growth of mining communities such as those at Kapunda, Burra and northern Yorke Peninsula, with their strong Cornish heritage. Even 'Australia's earliest mining era', the discovery and exploitation of first silver-lead and then copper in the Adelaide Hills in the 1840s, is linked inextricably to early Cornish immigrants in what was then the colony of South Australia. However, this emphasis, understandable and welcome as it is, serves to obscure part of the story - that Cornwall had been identified as an especially suitable source of emigrants before the mineral discoveries in South Australia, and that a significant number of the colony's earliest European settlers were Cornish.