John Leech (1817-1864), depicted the future Mothers of Australia as they boarded a ship for Australia in the 1850s ...
'Alarming prospect, the single ladies off to the diggings' (National Library of Australia).

Here's your chance to talk to other Family Tree enthusiasts. It's a place you can share information, solve that genealogical puzzle ... or pick up some juicy tidbits of gossip.
Everyone is welcome to contribute their thoughts or questions.
The Australian Family History Network is produced in association with our other website, Australian Quotes and Notes.
If you'd like to find out what your family was doing when great Australian events were happening, refer to www.australianquotes.com.
Our moderator is journalist and author, John Larkins, whose great-great grandmother, Eliza Pugh, from Radnorshire, Wales, may have been one of those 'single ladies' (pictured above, or below). She sailed, aged 22, to Victoria in 1857 on the Mount Stuart Elphinstone.
She had a most adventurous time on the diggings and became the matriarch of scores of today's Australians.
But it's not just for Australians whose origins are in the English-speaking world. We'd like to hear from people who might know how to use genealogical networks from all over the globe.

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More of those desirable single women ... the artist Alfred Ducote saw them as beautiful butterflies,
fluttering from England to the nets of eager Australian colonists (National Library of Australia).

We're particularly keen to follow the fortunes of the 6000 'Bounty' (assisted immigrants) who came to Victoria (then called Port Phillip) in 1840-41. We'd guess they'd have 300,000 descendants today. They were poor people from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England. They were brought to the Port Phillip District at a time convict transportation to the Australian mainland ended. The new, Middle-Class settlers of Melbourne needed another source of servants and farm hands ... so they imported an entire Working Class!
The barque (three-master) India was one of the 40 ships used in this mass migration. The India left Greenock, west of Glasgow, on 4 June, 1841, with 193 Bounty migrants. On 19 July, 1841, she caught fire and sank off the South American coast. Seventeen people died, but the rest were rescued and eventually arrived in Melbourne aboard the Grindlay on 22 October, 1841.
Let's take one India/Grindlay family and see how they managed in the tiny settlement of Melbourne: John Primrose, 32, his wife, Isabella, 33, and their daughters, Amelia, 6, and, Isabella (written down by the arrivals clerk as 'Elizabeth'), 4. John had been a porter in Edinburgh, and Isabella (Robertson) was a crofter's daughter from the village of Blair Athol, 80km northeast across the Firth of Forth.
When they arrived, Melbourne had an embarrassment of immigrants. So what did the Primrose family do? We know that they were saved by the Gold Rush in 1851, and finished up in Ballarat. Isabella died there of heart disease, aged 65, on 19 January, 1873. John went to live with his daughter, Isabella/Elizabeth at Jindivick, in west Gippsland, where he died, aged 69, as a 'gentleman' of a stomach abscess on 3 June, 1879. His death was reported by his son-in-law, William Gilby.
John and Isabella had one other living child, George, born about 1844. Two other died in infancy, Daniel and Frances.
Was the Primrose's brave immigration a success. We hope some of their many descendants, be they Gilbys, Holmes (Amelia's husband), or Primroses might tell us online.

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Can anyone solve this mystery ... ?
An Isle of Man (UK) website tells us: A typical case is of Jane Quayle, alias Cowell, she was the wife of John Quayle shoemaker of Douglas, on the 13th August 1822 she stole a piece of lace valued at 14 shillings, a silk scarf, a silk shawl and some other small articles with Mary Cowell (her sister?). They were taken to the hulks at Woolwich by Thomas Cleator and were received on board the ship Mary by Captain Steele, on May 18th 1823. They were to be transported for seven years for their crime.
Jane, of course, left her husband behind, she would have been able to take any children with her, boys under six years and girls under ten years of age were allowed to accompany their mother.
For this journey to a new life they had to be provided with a spare jacket or gown, one spare petticoat, two spare shifts, two spare handkerchiefs, two spare pairs of stockings and an extra pair of shoes.
The NSW Colonial Secretary's records show that Jane Quayle (or 'Quale, as it was misspelt)', aged about 21, arrived in Sydney on the Mary with 59 female convicts, another 67 having been dropped off at Hobart. It was an all-woman ship; one died during the voyage.
She was assigned to the outlying western Sydney settlement of Castlereagh, probably as a servant in the employ of the Anglo-Irish Major George Druitt, engineer-in-charge of road building. There she met John Ford, then 35, who'd been transported for life in 1818. He was well-regarded by Major Druitt and had been promoted to superintendent of convicts.
Jane Quayle requested permission to marry him in 1824, and they were married in 1825. By the time of the 1828 Census, they had two children, Mary, aged four, and Jane (jnr) aged nine months.
Well, was she a bigamist? And what happened to the descendants of the little family?