4 ideas
Richard Mahony, an Irish-born doctor in gold-rush Victoria, builds a practice and a fortune through mining shares, then repeatedly uproots his family to England and back, unable to settle anywhere. His investments collapse through an agent's fraud and his own neglect, his practices fail, and he declines into dementia from neurosyphilis.
The novel lets a man's chronic dissatisfaction with every place and position be read at first as temperament: pride, snobbery, a romantic longing for elsewhere. As his organic brain disease emerges, those same traits can be reread as possible early signs of it, which blurs the line between personality and pathology. The lens changes how we judge difficult people: behavior we moralize may already be illness that has not yet been recognized.
Mary, much younger and convinced she is not clever, is overruled on each of Richard's major decisions. When he collapses, she proves more practical and resilient than he ever was. The cost is that competence forced by crisis brings hardship, resentment, and uncomfortable authority rather than triumph, because she must manage her husband as she would a child.
A migrant who idealizes the homeland finds on returning that both the place and he have changed. He then idealizes the colony he left, and each move resets his social standing and savings. The fantasy of a true home somewhere else feeds the cycle of departures, because no real place can match the imagined one and so no place can end the search.