The D'Arcy Archive
2 images

Gallery

Everything this archive holds as a picture — which is two things, one of them not a document. The shortness of this page is itself a finding.

This family produced four soldiers, a gaol governor, a government printer and a church organist across two hundred years. It has left one photograph of one person, and that only because a newspaper printed it when he came home with a medal.

That is not unusual and it is worth saying why. Photography was expensive until it was not, and the people in this archive are printers, constables, clerks and labourers, not the sort of family that sat for portraits. What survives of them is what a government wrote down. The documents →
photograph · Printed 18 January 1919

Lance-Corporal Vivian Claude Sneyd, M.M. and Bar

Newspaper halftone portrait of a young man in a peaked military cap and tunic, head and shoulders, looking slightly to his left.
A newspaper halftone, head and shoulders, in a peaked cap and tunic. Captioned in the paper: “Lance-corporal Vivian Sneyd, 3rd Field Ambulance, A.I.F., M.M. and Bar.”
The Brisbane Courier, Saturday 18 January 1919, page 5, under “On Honour's Roll”
As far as this archive knows, the only photograph of anyone in his generation of this family. →
illustration · Commissioned for this archive, 2026

The crossing

A wide painted panorama in three parts under one horizon: an English shore, a quay with a sailing ship loading, and a flat gold Australian plain with a railway.
A painted triptych under one horizon: a cold English shore with a great house faint on a hill, a stone quay where a three-masted ship is loading, and a flat gold country with a railway line running out of sight.
Not a document. Commissioned illustration, and the house on the hill is faint on purpose.
The archive cannot show that this family ever lived in that house. The middle and the right of the picture it can prove. →

What is missing, and where it might be

Four faces this archive would most like and does not have.

WhoWhy there is nothing
Arthur Hartley SneydKilled at Pozières at 22. No photograph is known. His attestation paper gives his height, his complexion, his eye colour and his religion — everything except a face. →
Samuel Charles SneydSoldier of the 4th, sergeant of the NSW Mounted Police, chief constable at Moreton Bay, Governor of Brisbane Gaol. Four careers, no likeness. →
Any of the eight womenSixty-seven children between them and not one photograph, letter or will yet found. →
Major-General Robert D'Arcy, C.B.Fifty-one years in the Corps of Royal Engineers. The Corps painted its senior officers. The Royal Engineers Museum at Chatham has never been asked. →
If you have a photograph of any of these people, it is the most valuable thing you could send. A shoebox in a Brisbane cupboard almost certainly holds more images of this family than the entire internet does. Other things worth doing →