GREAT HARVEST OF DIVORCE.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 15783, 3 April 1919, Page 5

GREAT HARVEST OF DIVORCE.

(Post’s Sydney Correspondent.) SYDNEY, March 21. New South Wales has always been notable as the land of easy divorce. It is much easier to break the matrimonial tie here than in New Zealand. In the Dominion divorce is secured chiefly as tiie result of bad conduct or of lengthy desertion. In New South, Wales one may also get a divorce on a much shorter period of proved desertion, and on failure to comply with an order for the restitution of conjugal rights. The latter makes divorce easier and “respectable”—there is not attached to the process that suggestion of “something not quite, nice” that surrounds divorce in New Zealand, for instance. Divorce cases have been steadily increasing in numbers here for some years past, but the present session of the Divorce Court is literally overwhelmed with applications, which total over 400. It has been found necessary to bring another Court and another Judge into operation, and both Courts at the moment are hard at work untying matrimonial knots which have galled. The great increase is directly the result of the war—of the return from active service of soldiers whose wives have fallen in the clutch of circumstances. It was bound to come. The behaviour of a great number of young women, the wives of soldiers, who congregated in Sydney after their husbands went away and left them allowances to live on, was scandalous. They completely lost their balance, and plunged into all sorts of dissipations. Many of them had only married their men when the latter decided to enlist. Many of them, again, owing to temperamental differences, were practically abandoned, the husband having fied to the recruiting office as a way of escape. Societies of various kinds worked amongst these young women, trying to keep the home of the absent soldier from ruin, but were not always successful. Drink, love of night life, desire for expensive clothes, caused many domestic disasters. Now the day for restitution has come. Fully half of the divorce cases now being handled have been listed by soldiers. One feature of the proceedings is the number of times this line occurs: “Petitioner met co-respondent and thoroughly thrashed him.” There were many skulking undesirables who made a practice of preying on soldiers’ wives.