At the dawn of the 19th century the tide of the Napoleonic wars has finally turned; the United States of Mexico and of America are thrashing out bloody borders outwith the grip of their respective distracted colonial powers, the urbanisation and hideous wealth gap of the British Isles has led to a record high of crime in England and ruthlessly-punished rumbles of rebellion from the rest of the 'united' kingdoms from which troops and fodder are drawn. Thieves, forgers, killers, smugglers and prostitutes are all sent to swell the British Empire's presence and claim to the strange southern land and provide the backbone of a workforce with which to raise buildings, build roads, and hack an unknown landscape into a perfect image of European agriculture.

Governor Macquarie is the man in charge. Brought in to restore order to the colony after the Rum Rebellion and its aftermath, the Governor's committment to justice and civilised progress in the colony has not made him popular with anyone. The Royal Navy resents the transfer of colonial power to the army; the troops resent a competent overseer requiring them to actually work; the convicts resent the increased risk of there being consequences for things like bootlegging or shooting natives; the free settlers resent being put on a legal par with emancipated convicts and the natives don't appreciate the colony having the organisation and drive to expand.

Sydney & Parramatta are about the size of an English market-town and village respectively. The urban demographics still lean Anglo-Irish and male, but many soldiers' and sailors' wives have come out to settle, a few natives have drifted in as survivors of smallpox epidemics and traders' brides, a handful of whalers and sealers from across the Empire have taken up residence, many of them mixed-race, and an Australian-born generation of colonists is starting to become an influential presence.

Rural Settlement is officially overseen by the Governor's office, though this doesn't stop 'squatters' expanding into unclaimed land and felling timber, building houses and tilling fields etc. without sanction. Squatters are generally tolerated and may even form white communities out on the land, though their dubious interaction with the sketch of a system keeping peace between the settlers and aboriginies leaves them more vulnerable to conflict (and Governor Macquarie deals with aggressors on either side harshly).

The natives are sparse and mostly bemused by these new, strange-looking people. They tend to go around them where possible, since they get tetchy if you pull up 'their' grass or kill 'their' animals, and some of them even become annoyed at interactions that distract them from this 'work' stuff they can't seem to get enough of. In the colonised area of NSW, twenty-nine 'tribes' or clan lineages with three distinct dialects are roughly grouped into the Eora Nation. Settler contact has not yet been made with the Wiradjuri peoples west of the Blue Mountains, whose homeland has recently been earmarked for pasture subsequent to June's sucessful mapping of a potential route across the peaks.