 During the late 18th and early 19th centuries over a third of the Cornish workforce was employed in the mining industry.A mixture of famine and collapses in the mining industry in their native Cornwall forced many thousands of Cornish people to leave their homes from the 1840s.However their skills in hard-rock and metalliferous mining were so sought after that tens of thousands more were sent for over the following decades to build the growing Australian mining industry.