Professor Philip Payton

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Professor Philip Payton Professor Philip Payton Philip Payton is Professor of History at Flinders University and Emeritus Professor of Cornish and Australian Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. He has written extensively on Cornish and Australian topics, especially Cornish emigration and settlement in South Australia. His Making Moonta: The Invention of Australia’s Little Cornwall was published by University of Exeter Press in 2007, and followed by Regional Australia in the Great War: ‘The Boys from Old Kio’ (about Moonta and northern Yorke Peninsula in WWI) from the same publisher in 2012. Recent books include The Maritime History of Cornwall (ed. with Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe), University of Exeter Press, 2014, and Australia and the Great War, Robert Hale (London), 2015. Under the aegis of the Don Dunstan Foundation, he is currently completing Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia, shortly to be published by Wakefield Press. Place. Community and Identity: South Australia’s Cornish Mining Landscapes Paper Abstract The copper-mining landscapes of South Australia, principally those of Burra Burra in the mid- north and Moonta and environs on northern Yorke Peninsula, are today striking reminders of the State’s significant role in the mid-nineteenth century in the expansion of the international mining frontier and the attendant Cornish transnational identity. This paper illuminates the creation of the distinctive mining communities that inhabited these landscapes, first at Burra Burra in the 1840s and 1850s, and then on northern Yorke Peninsula in the 1860s and 1870s. It places them within the context of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’, elucidating the myths of ‘Cousin Jack’ and ‘Cousin Jenny’, the stories the Cornish told about themselves, which became powerful signifiers of Cornish ethnic identity overseas. From technology transfer to Methodism, the Cornish ethno-occupational and ethno-religious identity moulded the physical and cultural fabric of these communities, on the one hand re- creating ‘in the wilderness’ the environments that they had known ‘at home’ but on the other building something entirely new as they responded and adapted to very different conditions. .
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  • The University of Exeter<Br>
    News from the Universities The University of Exeter Initiatives in local, regional and community history The University of Exeter now operates on two separate campuses, Streatham Campus in Exeter and, since 2005, Tremough Campus near Falmouth, Cornwall. History at Exeter has expanded considerably in the last decade, partly as a result of the opening of the Tremough campus. There are now 27 full-time staff based at Streatham and another 10 in Tremough, with research interests extending from early Medieval Britain to post- Communist Eastern Europe. In the last five years there has also been a considerable intensification of activity in local and regional history, as History has sought to forge links with local community groups, institutions and other charitable and business organisations. In many respects staff at Tremough have taken the lead in developing these connections. A strong civic dimension has been developed within the History cluster at Tremough, with significant engagement with the Cornish community at a variety of levels. This was based initially on the long-standing work of the Institute of Cornish Studies, part of the University of Exeter but part-funded by Cornwall Council, and located in Cornwall well before the establishment of the Cornwall Campus. Since the early 1990s, the Institute has focused on issues of identity in modern Cornwall, which it has explored through a variety of methods—for example, biography, demography and oral history—and which has led among other things to the establishment of strong links with the overseas Cornish diaspora and to the publication of the annual volume Cornish Studies (University of Exeter Press).
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  • Philip Payton Contents
    Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia Philip Payton Contents Foreword – Hon. Jay Weatherill vii Labor or Labour? x Preface xi PART ONE RADICAL TRADITIONS 1 Radical Traditions – South Australia 3 2 Radical Traditions – The Cornish at Home and Abroad 25 PART TWO COPPER AND ORGANISED LABOR 3 1848 and All That – Antipodean Chartists? 55 4 Moonta, Wallaroo and the Rise of Trade Unionism 75 PART THREE RISE AND FALL 5 Towards Parliamentary Representation 121 6 Labor in Power – Tom Price and John Verran 152 7 Labor and the Conscription Crisis 187 8 Between the Wars 222 PART FOUR THE NATURAL PARTY OF GOVERNMENT? 9 The Dunstan Era 261 10 Life After Dunstan – To Bannon and Beyond 290 Epilogue 306 Notes 310 Index 349 Foreword The election, in May 1891, of Richard ‘Dicky’ Hooper – a Cornish miner from Moonta – as the first Labor MP in State Parliament might have represented a shock to the political establishment of South Australia. But his historic victory, in fact, resulted from the inception and steady growth of a determined and well-organised local labor movement – one that owed much of its origins to the zeal of Cornish copper miners who settled in the Mid North and on Yorke Peninsula during the early decades of the colony. As Philip Payton explains in this meticulously researched and superbly told story, among the many cultural traditions the Cornish brought with them was a belief in education and self-improvement, a deep devotion to the Methodist faith and an oftentimes fiery attachment to radical politics. In their vii adopted home of South Australia, these traits helped create an embryonic trade union movement and, in turn, led to the formation of the forerunner of today’s Labor Party.
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