The First Greek: With Ron Kandelaars in the Mid North region of South Australia

Much of South Australia's story is really a story of immigration. Just about everyone who's come here has come from somewhere else - apart from the "First Australians" as Matthew Flinders referred to the indigenous population circumnavigating the continent more than two centuries ago.

The rest of us - well were a hybrid lot. Many of the original settlers in the Barossa Valley came from German Silesia - in what is now modern day Poland. By the 1840s many Cornish miners were on their way to places like Burra and Kapunda.

That unstoppable wave of immigrants has continued ever since and a pivotal story about that massive wave of migration is told on a hilltop at Colton on Eyre Peninsula.

Colton - with its quiet cemetery, old school house-cum residence and Church is a sleepy little town half way up the West Coast of Eyre Peninsula.

It's a place where locals and tourists drop in to buy a loaf of bread or a sticky bun from baker Mark Archer, and leave their money in a the honesty box. For others it's simply a stretch of the Flinders Highway to put the foot down. But stay a while and an essential part of the Greek migrant story in South Australia reveals itself. Up on a lonely hilltop stands the headstone for George Tramountanas.

George came to South Australia as an eighteen-year-old and worked on the ship the Admella. Luckily he signed off before its ill-fated voyage in 1859 which saw the vessel wrecked off the South Australian coast with massive loss of life. However, his days at sea could help explain George's later name change. Tramountanas means 'wind direction'.... And later in life this migrant - the very first Greek migrant to South Australia and arguably the first to Australia - would call himself George North.

George became a farmer and was eventually buried here in 1911. The grave of George Tramountanas - the first Greek migrant to South Australia's shores - is located just up the hill from the Colton Bakery. The town of Colton is about twenty kilometres north of Elliston on the Flinders Highway.

Published 22nd September 2008