page_title: Cornish Australians
section_title: Victoria
hierarchical_section_title: Cornish Australians / Immigration history / Mining / Victoria
caption_attribution_description: Statue commemorating the many Cornish and German miners who helped build Bendigo Victoria Australia's gold mining industry
context_page_description: Cornish Australians are citizens of Australia who are fully or partially of Cornish heritage or descent, an ethnic group native to Cornwall in the United Kingdom. They form part of the worldwide Cornish diaspora, which also includes large numbers of people in the US, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico and many Latin American countries. Cornish Australians are thought to make up around 4.3 per cent of the Australian population and are thus one of the largest ethnic groups in Australia and as such are greater than the native population in the UK of just 532,300.
  Cornish people first arrived in Australia with Captain Cook, most notably Zachary Hickes, and there were some Cornish convicts on the First Fleet, James Ruse, Mary Bryant, along with several of the early governors. The creation of South Australia, with its emphasis on being free of convicts and religious discrimination, was championed by many Cornish religious dissenting groups and Cornish people comprised a sizeable proportion of settlers to that colony. Large scale Cornish emigration to Australia did not begin until the 1840s, coinciding with the Cornish potato famine and slumps in the Cornish mining industry.
context_section_description: The Cornish played an important role in the development of the Victorian goldfields.
  In 1881 46.9 percent of fathers and 41.4 percent of mothers in Bendigo were born in Cornwall. This was in addition to those Cornish who were born in Australia or places as far afield as Mexico or Brazil. The Cornish in Bendigo outnumbered the combined strength of their Irish and Scottish counterparts.
   Along with Bendigo, Ballarat was one of the major Cornish mining settlements in Victoria. Many Cornish settled in Geelong, especially after the decline of the gold-fields.
caption: A statue commemorating Cornish miners in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
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