One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in South Australia

A historical overview of the political organisation that surprisingly influenced the making of modern Australia.

In this vivid account of the radical tradition in the Labor movement in South Australia, Philip Payton shows how the many thousands of people who emigrated from Cornwall to the newly-established colony in the nineteenth century brought their way of life with them. Overwhelmingly Methodist in religion, and united by their motto ‘One and All’, these Cornish migrants settled in the copper-mining districts of Burra, Kapunda and northern Yorke Peninsula. Here they laid the foundations for early trade unionism and an emergent Labor Party, culminating in 1910 in the Premiership of John Verran (a Cornish miner) who formed the very first social democratic Labor government anywhere in the world. Contributing to the unique character of Labor in South Australia, the Cornish helped craft the State’s distinctive radical tradition, an enduring impact which Don Dunstan readily acknowledged in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose legacy is still apparent in the early twenty-first century.