CHAP, IX] DIVORCE AND STATUS 1239 
Inconvenient if it were to be adopted as law in one part of 
Australia only, and thus cause one Colony to have more 
simple divorce laws than any of the rest; and the third laid 
it down that the basis of divorce should be domicile, other- 
wise there would be the hopeless result that in various parts 
of the Empire there would be persons who were in some 
places lawfully married, in others not, and the matter was still 
worse if second marriages were formed by divorced persons. 
In 1890, however, the Victorian Act of 1889 regarding 
divorce was accorded the royal assent by Order in Council of 
March 21. The causes laid down for divorce were habitual 
drunkenness coupled with failure to support for three years, 
or with cruelty on the husband’s part, or drunkenness with 
neglect of domestic duties on the wife’s part, or desertion 
for three years; and after three years’ imprisonment a peti- 
tion could be presented if the respondent had still a com- 
muted sentence for a capital crime to face, or a sentence of 
at least seven years’ penal servitude ; a petition was possible 
if within the preceding year the respondent had murderously 
assaulted the petitioner, and in the case of the wife because 
of adultery either in the conjugal residence or coupled with 
circumstances of aggravation or of a repeated act of adultery : 
of all these new causes of divorce there was only one, the last, 
which was then law in Australia, being that adopted in the 
New South Wales Act of 1881. These causes of divorce 
were only open to persons bona fide domiciled in the Colony 
for two years and upwards before the bringing of the petition, 
but for the purposes of the word domicile a deserted wife 
who was domiciled in the Colony at the time of her desertion 
was included, and such a wife was to be deemed to retain her 
Victorian domicile notwithstanding a change of domicile 
on the part of her husband. But no persons should be 
entitled to petition for divorce who had resorted to the 
Colony for that purpose only.2 
' Cf. Quick and Garran, Constitution of Commonwealth, p. 610. Clark, 
Australian Constitutional Law, pp. 98, 99, held that under s. 118 of the 
Constitution a divorce in one state is valid in every other, but this is not 
sound law, for the contrary has now been held in the United States. 
® Act No. 1166. s. 74.