I recently read Colin Thomas’ fantastic little e-book about the history of the Welsh in America, and the huge cultural, social and political impact the Welsh have had on that country. As is the case with America and elsewhere the contribution of the Welsh towards the building of the modern world is largely unknown and underappreciated. Especially in comparison to our Celtic cousins, and of course the English.

So while its not hard to find a book along these lines focusing on the part played by England, Scotland and Ireland in shaping the modern world, there has yet to be one (to my knowledge) on the not insubstantial impact that Welsh people have had in this story.

As someone who lives and works in Australia, but who has nonetheless retained a keen interest in the history and current affairs of my homeland (I’m sure to the dismay of my girlfriend), its hard not to notice the continued influence of the Welsh on this side of the globe.

It’s a small world

Having been lucky enough to recently travel around much of Australia, and trying to find time to visit local museums and bookshops on the way, where possible, I keep finding myself stumbling over items of Welsh interest. Well……I might have been going out of my way a bit to find them!

They include things such as: a giant Welsh bible and vase decorated with Welsh castles in Port Pirie museum; a statue of a Welsh miner in the Scenic World attraction in the Blue Mountains; the various town, suburb or street names of Welsh origin found all around Australia; a section on Welsh migrants in Newcastle city museum featuring an Eisteddfod Chair, poetry trophy and another Welsh bible; a dusty old book about Thomas Price in a South Australian bookshop. To take just a few random examples.

So it starts becoming clear that Welsh men and women for many years have left their mark here, and when you dig a little deeper beyond the incidental items I have described above there really is a fascinating story to be told. One that this post will only scratch the surface of.

Not being a historian this will be no in-depth study of what is a massive topic. I’ll wait for a proper historian to write the book. So this is just a few interesting facts I have discovered over the years on my travels. Many I’m sure people will be familiar with. Hopefully there’s a few they might not be.

So I’ll start with one small but coincidental example:

Having been in Australia for roughly five years, there has probably been no greater surprise for me than when I found out that the popular local swimming bath, roughly cut into rocks only five minutes walk from where I lived at the time, was the site of a tragic drowning.

Now the drowning itself was not the surprise, I would have been more surprised to find out that no-one had drowned there after one look at the massive waves which regularly pound the pool. No the surprise was that the man who had drowned (in the Bogey Hole as it is known), was a Welsh poet by the name of T. Harri Jones. A senior lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle. I felt a slightly macabre interest in knowing that a fellow Welshman had ended his life in this pool of water. I decided not to go in.

I Googled the unfortunate man when I got back home and was even more surprised to find out that he was from Llanafan Fawr, a tiny village on the outskirts of Builth Wells and where my great-grandfather is buried in St Afans church (I’m definitely glad I didn’t go in).

“Small world” didn’t quite seem to cut it! I bought a book of his poetry, and despite being a complete amateur when it comes to poetry it was still quite enjoyable to see poems about my hometown of Builth Wells, next to poems about my new home in Australia, the city of Newcastle. I later discovered that there is a blue plaque in his memory at my old school, Builth Wells High School.

Leaders

I’ve been interested in politics for some years, so one of the first things I noticed about Australia when I got here was the important role in Australia’s political development a number of Welsh people have made.

When I first arrived in Australia they had only two months previously ousted the Welsh born (in Barry) Prime Minister of the country — Julia Gillard. I soon learnt that she was the second Welsh Prime Minister that Australia had endured/benefited from (delete as per your political leanings).

The first being William Morris-Hughes (Billy Hughes or the “Little Digger” as he was known) who had led Australia through the First World War, while another Welshman was leading Britain through the same world war, David Lloyd-George. Woodrow Wilson the American president had only narrowly beaten another Welshman, Charles Evans-Hughes (the Republican candidate), in the recent 1916 American election.

At the peace treaty at Versailles following the war Billy Hughes asserted Australia’s rights when he made the point to Woodrow Wilson that “I speak for 60 000 [Australian] dead”. A heavy toll, only surpassed per head of population by the Welsh who lost 40 000 from a smaller population. Hughes forcefully, and rather annoyingly to some including Wilson, pushed himself into the debates about the post war world order. He was an Australian patriot as well as a British imperialist, and his politics at the conference reflected this.

It should be remembered that Australia at this time was still a relatively new country, having only federated 13 years before the outbreak of the Great War. Like America at the time of its independence Australia was a country of roughly 3 million people spread between a number of separate and largely independent colonies.

It fell to one man to create a constitution for this new nation, Samuel Griffith from Merthyr Tydfil. Having previously been the Premier of Queensland, this lawyer would go on to be the principal author of the Australian constitution and the first Chief Justice of Australia. He also succeeded in having a suburb of Brisbane named after his home town!

In the new country’s early years before the war another Welshman, Thomas Price from Brymbo in Denbighshire, created the worlds first stable Labor government in South Australia, a government which lasted from 1905 to 1910. Many people in Wales these days may be looking to South Australia to try and learn how to get rid of a Labour government after just five years, but back then it was a remarkable feat.

One final political leader in Australia’s early history was Alf Morgans from Machen in Monmouthsire, Premier of Western Australia for just 32 days. He was basically the Alun Michael of his day, so I ‘ll leave that one there.

Shops, plots, rocks, vox-pops and the Victorian Cross

Of course its not just in politics that the Welsh have been prominent. As we know we can be pretty good at selling things (a small tradition I’ve been keeping alive since I’ve been in Australia), especially in the form of department stores. The biggest department store chain and longest surviving under its original name in Australia retains the name of its founder (probably the most typically Welsh name of them all) David Jones, or Dai Jones’ as the locals know it (I’m kidding of course). They even had a display about David Jones in the window of one of their Sydney stores once when I walked past. Where I could discover among other things that David Jones was from Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire, he was also a politician (a member of the Legislative Council of New South Wales), so maybe I need to go back and change the start of this paragraph.

Talking about New South Wales, of course the original colony and largest state (in terms of population) is named after a Welsh region. I’m still to discover why it is named so, most people don’t really seem to know and suggest it was either because it looked a bit like it; that a Welsh botanist on the First Fleet suggested the name; that it was originally just the “New Wales of the South” (as in southern hemisphere); or that its because the weather is so similar (I’m not too sure about that last one). My personal theory is that as the land was originally named “New Holland” they realised it didn’t make much sense, as Holland is flat and this place was lumpy, so they just named it after another lumpy place. Surely that’s as good a guess as any of the others?

Anyway, it wasn’t the last place down here to be blessed with a Cambrian name. Here’s a list of Welsh place names in Australia, I think I’ve been to most of them now:

Swansea, Cardiff, Merthyr, Llangothlin, Caernarvon, Aberdare, Aberglasslyn, Abermain, Neath, Bangor, Llanarth, Ebbw Vale, Abergavenny, Anglesea, Llanelli, Welshpool, Llandilo.

That’s not including the numerous streets with Welsh names, such as numerous Tudor Streets, Morgan Streets, Pryce Streets and Llywelyn Streets to name a few I have passed through recently.

A few more Welsh-Australians worth noting and with which I share some links include Edgeworth David, who was an explorer and geologist (the link here being that I studied geology at university), who discovered the Hunter Valley coalfield and led the first expedition to the magnetic south pole. Edgeworth David was born in St Fagans, Cardiff.

Another is Joseph Jenkins who was an itinerant worker, like myself. As he travelled Australia he kept a now famous set of diaries about his travels and life through which he has became familiar to generations of schoolchildren. His “Diaries of a Welsh Swagman” is on the curriculum of Victorian state schools. It is also believed that the “jolly swagman” mentioned in Australia’s most famous song — Waltzing Matilda — is a reference to Joseph Jenkins. Jenkins was a tenant farmer in Tregaron, Ceredigion before he suddenly left his home and family at the age of fifty in the hope of making his fortune in Australia.

Finally, one of the more recent Welsh-Australian names I have stumbled across was that of Sir Hughie Idwal Edwards.

As I have travelled around Australia I tend to have a look at any signs, statues, memorials or generally anything of historic interest. While exploring Fremantle, Western Australia I came across a statue and immediately noticed the Welsh sounding name. A quick Google search told me that Idwal (as his family called him) was an impressive figure. He was a senior officer in the Royal Air Force, Governor of Western Australia and a recipient of the Victoria Cross. Indeed he was the most highly decorated Australian of the Second World War. A true war hero!

Now, as is often the case with Wales and England, New Zealand often gets lumped in with its larger neighbour, so that is just what I’ll do next.

New Zealand

Being down this end of the world I’ve also had a couple of chances to explore New Zealand and while less familiar with the country than Australia. I still couldn’t help noticing a couple of Welsh connections.

The most entertaining one for me was when I was in Queenstown, which as anyone who has been there will know is one of the most beautiful towns in the world. Huddled as it is between the mountains of the southern Alps and perched on the edge of Lake Wakatipu. Its a proper tourist town, but is still rather charming. So imagine my pleasure to find out that the town was founded by a Welshman, William Gilbert Rees from Pembrokeshire. I wasn’t even that disappointed when I saw his statue in the middle of town holding on to a sheep (come on we’re not all like that!).

There is also a famous fiord to the south west of Queenstown which sadly I didnt have time to visit. Milford Sound which is named after Milford Haven is acclaimed as New Zealand’s most famous tourist destination, and was called the eigth wonder of the world by Rudyard Kipling. It is fed by the Cleddau River which is also named for its Welsh counterpart.

Modern Welsh-Australians

There are between 6–7 million Welsh people around the world and about 125,000 of them can be found in Australia. These are people either born in Wales or who have Welsh parents (there’s about 700,000 if you count people with some Welsh ancestry). Perhaps most famously this number includes the Minogue sisters, Kylie and Dannii, who’s mother was from Maesteg. But it also includes many others who have contributed to Australia in numerous ways whether large or small.

Some of them may still worship in some of the Welsh churches that can still be found dotted around the country, the most famous being the Welsh Church in the centre of Melbourne. Others may take part in some of the cultural institutions of the Welsh diaspora, such as the Eisteddfods which are held across Australia or the male voice choirs that still draw crowds, like the Sydney Welsh Choir.

Conclusion

So if you’ve made it this far you can see that even assuming that this list is complete (which it is obviously far from) then the Welsh contribution to Australia (and New Zealand) is not insubstantial.

While most of the people I have described above were, as far as I can discover, fond of or proud of their Welsh roots, they often became proud Australians/Kiwis.

It was George Washington who said that: “Good Welshmen make good Americans” because they were hard working, literate, skilled, protestant and quickly integrated into American life.

No doubt the same dynamic took place (and continues to take place) in Australia, and so good Welshmen and women will continue to make good Australians. While hopefully not completely forgetting the old country.