Morgan Bach a’i fam yn ymddiddan ynghylch myned i Australia.

[=Morgan Bach and his mother discussing going to Australia]. [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 sailing ship on the first side below the title; at the foot of the text is printed the author’s name and hometown ‘ISAAC THOMAS, Aberdar’; text in Welsh; bent corners, toning spots and 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 first part of the story of a fictional character named Morgan Bach, who decides to head for Australia to seek his fortune – much to his mother’s despair. 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’ Morgan Bach a’i fam yn ymddiddan ynghylch myned i Australia; examples of another version printed in Caernarfon by H. Humphreys are held in the University of Melbourne Library and the State Library of New South Wales.