Person

Rolleston, Christopher (1817 - 1888)

CMG

Born
27 July 1817
Burton-Joyce, Nottinghamshire, England
Died
9 April 1888
Milsons Point, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation
Public servant

Summary

Christopher Rolleston was Registrar-General 1855-1864. In 1856 he launched the compulsory registration of births, deaths and marriages, based upon statistical principles introduced earlier in Victoria by W.H. Archer. The details required on the new registration forms made the records among the fullest and most useful in the world. He later became Auditor-General (1864-1883) and was heavily involved in many external bodies including: President of Philosophical (later Royal) Society of New South Wales; Director of the European Assurance Society; Director of the Mercantile Bank of Sydney; Director of the Australian Gaslight Co; superannuation fund commissioner; a trustee of the Australian Club; an official trustee of the Australian Museum; and chairman of the Government Asylums Board for the Infirm and Destitute.

Details

Chronology

1842 - 1853
Career position - Commissioner of crown lands in Darling Downs
1855
Career position - Private Secretary to the Governor-General, Sir William Denison
1855 - 1864
Career position - Registrar-General
1864 - 1883
Career position - Auditor-General
1869
Career position - President, Imperial Royal Commission into alleged kidnapping of natives of the Loyalty Islands
1879
Award - Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG)

Published resources

Book Sections

Resources

Rosanne Walker

EOAS ID: biogs/P002527b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P002527b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260