Parish records exist prior to the commencement dates.
When Victoria became a separate Colony on 1st July 1851, copies of the ecclesiastical records were returned to Melbourne. Tasmania was the first colony to introduce civil registration of births, deaths and marriages on 1st December 1838, followed by Western Australia on 1st September 1841 and then South Australia on 1st June 1842. New Zealand took it up on 1st January 1848 and Norfolk Island did not detach itself from New South Wales record keeping until 1st January 1882. As so often happens, the last proved to be the best because the Victorian system, devised by William Henry Archer, a brilliant statistician and the first Registrar-General of the colony, soon became an internationally acknowledged model of efficiency and it was adopted by New South Wales three years after its institution. Prior to 1864 in Queensland and 1895 in New South Wales, details of birthplace and parentage of the parties to a marriage were omitted from official registrations, but spaces for this information were left on the forms supplied to clergy, so it can normally be recovered from church registers.