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young what I had to come through with your conduck . We might have been the happiest couple in Greenock, you got a good wife and many a good job at home if you had been inclined to do well but folks that cante
do well at home is not to be trusted Abroad …poor Duncan [child number 5] does not
know what sort of thing a Father is, he thinks it is something for eating … find a
proper place where I will send my letters. No more at present from your deserted
Wife Janet Kincaid.
    British subjects had expectations of how they should be treated: with fairness and
dignity.
    Similarly, it seems, some women believed in their own form of marital justice. Husbands
who breached such standards of civility could expect their comeuppance.

ALL THE SINGLE LADIES
    Deserted wives might have had it tough, but single women could do remarkably well
for themselves in their new homeland. In fact, some fared better on arrival in Victoria
than their male counterparts.
    Australia had always had a problem with gender imbalance—the legacy of starting out
as a penal colony—and the gold rush only made it worse. The British government was
eager to address the disproportion of the sexes by paying the travel expenses of
young unmarried women.
    This ‘assisted passage’ scheme was massively successful. In 1853, almost 10,000 single
women arrived in Victoria as government-sponsored immigrants.
    Some female immigrants already had work lined up. When nineteen-year-old Irish girl
Eliza Darcy sailed to Victoria on the City of Manchester in July 1854, she went straight
into the service of Mr Jeffreys, on the Great Western Road, employed on a three-month
contract for £18 with rations. (Eliza travelled alone to Victoria, but also sailing
on the City of Manchester were members of the Howard family from Dublin. Devout Catholics,
the Howard and Darcy lines would later unite in the passion-fuelled summer of 1854.)
    ELIZA DARCY (HOWARD)
----
    BORN Ireland, 1835
    DIED Geelong, 1920
    ARRIVED July 1854, on the City of Manchester
    AGE AT EUREKA 19
    CHILDREN Twelve, the first born in 1856.
    FAQ Irish Catholic, immigrated as a single girl, with members of her extended family.
Cousin of Alicia Dunne, who married Peter Lalor. Arrived in Ballarat October 1854.
Married miner Patrick Howard in 1855. Descendants include Shane, Marica and Damien
Howard (musicians).
    There was much to lure young women like Eliza. Victoria had a well-known ‘servant
problem’—as in, there weren’t enough servants to go around—which meant firstly that
the pay was good, but also that the employee was calling the shots. The comic magazine
Punch printed cartoons that showed boisterous young women telling their masters where
to go. In one, a girl leaves her master for the simple reason that he has not supplied
her with copies of Punch to read! In another, the young servant waits for her master
to chop the wood.
    Mrs May Howell found her newly hired servant couldn’t decide on a suitable starting
date. It was what they call colonial bounce , she said. She means to come, but thinks
as this is a free country she must show herself independent. William Westgarth observed
wryly that Victoria was the sort of place where a housemaid agreed to a temporary
trial of her new mistress .
    The marriage market, too, was wide open. One girl, employed as a servant, twittered
merrily to her sisters at home about her startling new prospects for matrimony:
    I had an offer a few days after landing from a gold-digger, with £600–£700. Since
that I have had another from a bushman, with £900; he has gone to the diggings again,
to make plenty of money. That I have not decided on yet. I shall have a handsome
house and garden and all I wish…I have so many chances.
    As well as a gold rush, Victoria was experiencing a ‘wife rush’.
    Eligible women had an astonishing new power to pick and choose their mate (a fact
that caused a moral panic about the control of defiant wives). Other single girls
could get themselves