These broadsheets offer emigration to South Australia via the Java (ship). The posters are from a larger group of records and letters written by Cornish settlers in South Australia and Victoria to their families in England.

Leaving home for a foreign land would have sounded like the last thing anyone wanted to do, but with skilled labour in short supply, Mr. I. Latimer and the Colonization Commissioners wanted to sweeten the proposal as much as possible by offerring free passage. The intended benefactors of the free passage were agricultural labourers, shepheards, carpenters, blacksmiths, stone masons, and all persons connected with building. The new colony was about to be inundated with an instant workforce. However, if the emigrants survived the voyage, would they be able to adjust to the foreign South Australian landscape? According to one of the posters, South Australia was a paradise.

The province of South Australia is a delightfully fertile and salubrious country, in every respect well adapted to the constitution of Englishmen, and is one of the most flourishing of all our colonies. It is well watered,-- and there have never been any complaints from the colonist of a want of this valuable element

The colony was perhaps well watered in Port Adelaide, which was the Java's destination, but it was likely the emigrants from this voyage would end up working and living further inland. With South Australia being the dryest state in the continent, the advertisement was somewhat misleading. The true betrayal turned out to be the conditions on board ship.

That fine first-class teak-built ship the Java...This ship's accommodations are unusually spacious and lofty, and are so arranged as to insure the comfort of all passengers. She will carry two Surgeons, and two School masters, the latter of who will be regularly employed in teaching the emigrants and their children.

According to documentation from ship board diaries in the Library's collection, the accommodations were severly cramped and the management of the ship in general was poor, with many cases of starvation and death reported. Click to see example of a diary.

Conigrave, Benjamin

Java (ship)

Richards, William, 1796-1866

Richards family

Richards, William Frederick, 1824-1893

Thomas, Neil That horried ship the Java 1990

Pike, Douglas. Paradise of dissent: South Australia 1829-1857. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967. pp.196-220, ch. 9: 'The South Australian Company.'

Price, Archibald Grenfell. Founders & pioneers of South Australia: life studies of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Charles Sturt, George Fife Angas, Sir John Hindmarsh, William Light, George Gawler, David McLaren, Augustus Kavel, and Francis Cadell; with illustrations & maps. Adelaide: Preece, 1929.

Stephens, John. The land of promise: being an authentic and impartial history of the rise and progress of the new British province of South Australia: including particulars descriptive of its soil, climate, natural productions, &c., and proofs of its superiority to all other British colonies : embracing also a full account of the South Australian Company ... by one who is going. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1839.

State Library of South Australia, General Information Factsheets Online: Shipping and passenger records