Timeline
Who this family were living under, and what it did to them. The point is not when people were born — it is what was happening around them when they were.
Every page on this site is about people. This one is about the state they lived under — because in an archive built almost entirely out of government paper, the state is not background. It is the reason the records exist at all.
The bands are the state, not the family
Robert D'Arcy's whole life, and his son's first thirty-five years. A standing army, a global war every twenty years, and a Board of Ordnance that commissioned engineers without recording where they came from.
Transportation. It is what brought this family to Australia: not free settlement but a garrison posting aboard a convict ship.
Separation from New South Wales. A new colony needed a Government Printing Office, a gaol, an electric telegraph and a police force, and this family staffed all four.
Federation, then two wars that took four men out of one family.
What was happening to them
21 events. The marked ones are the hinges — the moments after which this family is somewhere else, or someone else.