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campusreview.com.au
Photo: Philip Payton
International man
of history
A leading South Australian academic has been
recognised for his lifelong scholarship of Cornish history.
D
espite his many achievements, Philip Payton was surprised
to be awarded South Australian Historian of the Year by the
History Council of South Australia.
Photo: ABC TV
Student life
a laughing matter
A University of Melbourne alum is starring in an
on-campus TV show about international student life.
H
e’s been on the up and up for a while. First, he became
a senior correspondent on The Daily Show on Comedy
Central in the US. Then, he joined the cast of Warner Bros
film Crazy Rich Asians. Now, Ronny Chieng is being broadcast
2
“You could’ve knocked me over with a feather,” he exclaimed.
An adjunct history professor at Flinders University, Payton has
devoted much of his life to studying Cornish history, including
that in South Australia, where a 10th of the population is from
Cornish stock.
Payton is also an adjunct professor at the National Centre for
Australian Studies at Monash University, and emeritus professor of
Cornish and Australian studies at the University of Exeter.
Perhaps the world’s foremost Cornish history expert, Payton
directed the Institute of Cornish Studies from 1991 until 2013.
Born in Sussex in southeast England, he is half-Cornish on his
mother’s side. He has been fascinated by the ethnically Celtic
group on the southwest English peninsula since he was a teenager,
when he joined a Cornish political party. He parlayed this interest
into academia when he entered university in Bristol. Following
the completion of a doctorate in Cornish Australian history at the
University of Adelaide, he joined the Royal Navy for over a decade,
specialising in education. But he eventually found his way back to
his initial passion, history scholarship, full-time.
His latest tome, One and All: Labor and the Radical Tradition in
South Australia, chronicles how the Cornish were central to the
founding of the Labor Party in South Australia. This was due to their
involvement in radical political movements in Cornwall, as well as
their membership of copper mining unions.
“Although overshadowed by the Victorian gold rush, which
everyone knows about, copper in South Australia was pretty vital
to the development of the 19th century Australian economy,”
Payton noted. ■
to households across Australia in his eponymous comedy
series, Ronny Chieng: International Student.
Hailing from Johor Bahru, in Malaysia, Chieng moved to
Melbourne for his tertiary studies, graduating from the University of
Melbourne in 2009 with bachelor degrees in commerce and law.
Filmed on campus in Parkville and Burnley, the show is based
on Chieng’s experiences and somewhat realistically depicts the
life of an international student, navigating classwork and cultural
differences.
In one scene, a teacher instructs Chieng’s character and his
international student peers to seize an opportunity, saying: “You’ve
got nothing to lose.”
“We’ve got parents paying for us to be here so we can get a
better education so we can go back and get reputable professions
and/or takeover cushy family businesses: we literally have
everything to lose,” Chieng’s character responds, in a single breat