Editorial

In this year’s Journal, we range from the earliest days of colonial South Australia to the Dunstan era and beyond. The diversity of early European migrants in the colony is now well understood, and among the arrivals in the 1830s was a sprinkling of Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. One of their number, John Hope, an Ulster Protestant (or ‘Scots-Irishman’, as Rory Hope describes him in his article) left his home in Maghera, County Derry, reaching South Australia in 1839. Coming from a small business background, he found himself well attuned to the emerging social (and religious) temperament of the new colony, establishing himself at Clare in the mid-north, soon acquiring extensive property and becoming part of the influential pastoral class. He became a magistrate and local councillor, as well as supporting a variety of community activities. Yet he avoided the limelight, or so it seemed to his contemporaries, and, as Rory Hope observes, John Hope has subsequently (and unjustifiably) faded from the scene, an obscurity from which this article intends to rescue him.