Then and Now: Phillips’ Fruit Exchange, Kadina

Let me re-introduce you to George Phillips. I say re-introduce as I did blog about him and his family last year for one of my Alphabet posts. Anyway George is my great great great grandpa, and in this time I want to concentrate on George Phillips, the businessman.

Born in Cornwall in 1845, in 1865 George together with his wife, new baby boy George jnr, and his wife’s parents set sail for Adelaide, South Australia to start a new life.

Having grown up with his stepfather who was a miner back in Cornwall, it was only natural that after arriving at Port Adelaide in 1865, George and the family headed to the copper mines up at Moonta. It took them three days travelling by cart, but they got there. Anyway after 10 years of mining George got out of it for a reason we don’t yet know, so moved the family back to Adelaide and embarked on a new career and started up a fruit & veg business in Adelaide’s East End.

Obviously the family liked the slower pace of country life in the Yorke Peninsula, as in 1888 the family returned to the area, this time to the neighbouring town of Kadina where George opened up the “Phillips’ Fruit Exchange” in Taylor Street, Kadina. Sadly George died only a few years after it was established, leaving his wife, Mary Ann and his older boys George jnr and Samuel to run it. George jnr grew the business and was exporting fruit & veg as well as confectionery to every state around Australia. The business remained in the Phillips family until it was closed in 1980, only eight years short of it’s century.

Samuel Phillips who is in the pictures below is my great great grandpa.

 

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