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Making Moonta: The Invention of Australias Little Cornwall by Philip Payton. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2007, pp. xiii + 269, 47.50 Hardback/14.99 Paperback,
ISBN: 9780859897952 (hbk), ISBN 9780859897969 (pbk).

Moonta, on South Australias Yorke Peninsula, was one of
the most famous mining towns in Australia for nearly sixty
years: from the mid 1860s, when copper mining began,
until 1923, when it ended. The place was famous not only
for its mineral wealth but for its Cornishness. It is this
attribute that Philip Payton, director of Cornish Studies at
the University of Exeter, explores in his new book. He
views Moontas Cornishness through the prism of social
history, tracing themes such as migration, minework, labour
relations, religion and the lives of women. One fascinating
chapter provides a close study of the cult of Henry Richard
Hancock (HRH), the greatest mine captain of them all,
albeit technically not quite a Cornishman since he had been
born on the wrong side of the Tamar.
There were plenty of Cornish miners to be found in
other mining settlements in Australia and indeed in nineteenth-century mining
settlements all over the New World. But Moonta, Payton argues, occupied a special
place in the Cornish transnational identity. Hence his study revolves around the question:
what made Moonta distinctive? Put differently, how was the myth of Moontas
specialness created and sustained?
Payton points first to the givens. The Cornish traditionally felt themselves to be
ethnically separate, a Celtic people hailing (as they sometimes put it) from Cornwall
near England. There was also a particular self-belief rooted in the conviction that the
Cornish were innately superior as skilled hard-rock miners. The point about Moonta
was that such attitudes were reinforced by the sheer concentration of Cornish people in
one place. Elsewhere on the worlds mining frontiers, the Cornish were one element in a
multinational mlange, rubbing shoulders with the Welsh, the Irish, the Californians, the
Chinese. In Moonta, Cornishness was virtually undiluted. The whole community was
bound together by Cornish customs and culture. Cousin Jack and Cousin Jenny were
archetypal figures. Everyone sang Trelawny and everyone was Methodist. True, the
Methodism was not monolithic; it was divided between Wesleyans (the bosses chapel),
Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians; but that was just how it was in Cornwall itself.
Ethnic consciousness was further reinforced by new immigration, as mine captains or
their agents on labour-recruiting visits to Britain invariably insisted on Cornish labour.
Social solidarity was institutionalised in such organisations as the Masonic lodges, the
new trade unionism and, in due course, the Labor Party. In this tight-knit community,
local pride was a powerful force. Moonta was the hub of the universe; if you havent
been to Moonta you havent travelled.
The towns broader impact on South Australia was considerable. For a time it was
deemed second in importance only to Adelaide. John Verran of Moonta served as Labor
state premier in 1910-12. In fact the Moonta influence in South Australian Labors
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political culture long outlasted the towns heyday, with R.S. Richards carrying on as
Opposition leader until as late as 1949.
The heyday was effectively over by the 1920s. By that time social cohesion had been
loosening for some years. As the mining industry contracted, younger people in growing
numbers left town to find work elsewhere. During the World War there were bitter
disputes between pro- and anti-conscriptionists, with the increasingly conservative
Verran and others being opposed by anti-imperial militants. Linked to some extent with
these disputes was a degree of estrangement between the Methodist church and the labour
movement. And then came the cataclysm: the closing of the mines.
For all that, a version of the myth survived. Payton shows that in quite large measure
this was because key individuals and organisations worked to ensure that it did. For
example, the newspaper proprietor John Langdon Bonython energetically promoted
Cornish revivalism. The writer and illustrator Oswald Pryor made a major contribution,
especially with his affectionate Cousin Jack cartoons; in 1962 he published Australias
Little Cornwall, a hugely popular work that remains in print today. And in 1973 a state
government led by another premier with Cornish forebears, Don Dunstan, helped
establish Kernewek Lowender. This celebration of Cornishness, marketed unashamedly
(in Paytons phrase) as the worlds largest Cornish festival, has been held biennially in
the Moonta-Kadina-Wallaroo triangle ever since. More than a century after systematic
Cornish immigration ended, and more than eighty years after the demise of the copper
mines, Kernewek Lowender serves today as the principal bearer of the little Cornwall
tradition.
Payton tells his story with verve, a fine eye for detail and a nice sense of human
idiosyncracies. His work can be read in diverse ways, for it makes multiple contributions:
to migration studies, to regional studies, to identity studies. But above all it offers a vivid
portrait of the lived experience of a remarkable community. This is a gem of a book.


DAVID GOLDSWORTHY
Monash University