Eliza was sent to Australia aboard the 'Eliza Caroline' under the Earl Grey Scheme for Irish famine orphans. According to the ship list she was 19, from Donegal and RC. She could neither read nor write.
The ship arrived in Port Phillip at the end of March, 1850. She was assigned to work as a housemaid for a Geelong hotel owner and his wife. By the end of the year she had married William Matthews, a 40 year old English carpenter from Leicester who arrived in Geelong via Van Diemans Land or New South Wales. (Not known if it was his idea to emigrate to VDL or a court's.)
On her son's birth certificate she gave her birthplace as Lanark in Scotland; it may have been less of a stigma to be Scottish instead of an Irish orphan girl. The witnesses to her marriage were the sub matron from the Eliza Caroline, and an Irish immigrant who arrived in Geelong at the same time as she did (she also named her daughter Caroline).
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| Date of Birth | 1st Jan 1830 (circa) | |
