page_title: Cornish Australians
section_title: Premiers
hierarchical_section_title: Cornish Australians / Politics / Heads of Government / Premiers
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: Fourteen state premiers are known to have strong Cornish connections. At least six Premiers of South Australia, and four Premiers of Western Australia, have been of Cornish descent or birth.
caption: Edward Braddon, 18th Premier of Tasmania
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "38", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "770", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1080"}