AustLit

'We are delighted to welcome readers to a new year of History Australia and to a new team to manage it. Before introducing ourselves more fully, we would like to express our gratitude to Catharine Coleborne and James Dunk for being our special issue editors. It has been wonderful to have a safe pair of hands help us out during our tricky triennial change-over period. For more than a year they have planned and managed a brilliant collection of articles about the history of madness and marginality. Their introduction gives an excellent summary of the field, an outline of their contributors’ interventions, and a discussion of future directions on this topic. We are pleased to publish here their nine pieces. They span the history of madness in Australia and its supposed marginality, from convict times to the present. The articles delve into particular regions, like Western Australia, and into connections between the Australian colonies and other settler societies, such as South Africa. Together these articles show, as Coleborne and Dunk argue, how mental illness has been history’s ‘constant companion’ far more than it has ever really been on the margins.' (Kate Fullagar, Jessica Lake, Benjamin Mountford and Ellen Warne : Editorial introduction)