Dychweliad Morgan Bach o Australia : a’i fam (Gwen o’r Gyrnos) yn methu ei adnabod.

[=The return of Morgan Bach from Australia, unrecognisable to his mother (Gwen o’r Gyrnos)]. [Drop title]. [s.l.] : [s.n.], [between 1850 and 1860]. Chapbook ballad. Disbound duodecimo bifolium (155 x 90 mm), printed on all four sides with woodcut vignette of a paddle-steamer at the head of the first side; at the foot of the text is printed the author’s name and hometown ‘ISAAC THOMAS, Aberdar’; text in Welsh; bent corners, a little darkened from handling, otherwise a very good, complete example.

This mid-nineteenth-century chapbook street ballad about Welsh emigration to Australia is one of two penned by Isaac Thomas of Aberdare, a poor coal-mining town in the south of Wales. It tells the second part of the story of a fictional character named Morgan Bach, who returns home having made his fortune in Australia. Both ballads are reproduced in facsimile in Evans, Geraint, Morgan Bach in Australia: reproductions of two Welsh migration ballads from the 1850s. With translations and introduction by Geraint Evans, Melbourne : The Ancora Press, 2010.

Rare. Trove locates no copies of this edition of Isaac Thomas’ Dychweliad Morgan Bach o Australia; examples of another version printed in Llanrwst by John Jones are held in the National Library of Australia and the State Library of New South Wales.