Promoting the theory and practice of criminology: The Australian and New Zealand society of criminology and its founding moment

Abstract

The Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology was an initiative of Australia's first criminology department, at Melbourne, from where the proposal to establish a journal also evolved. The society was of its time, its priorities reflecting above all the negligible research knowledge of crime and criminal justice in the antipodes. But local initiative had a regional (Asia-Pacific) and international (disciplinary as well as geographical) context. In this article I explore some of this context, consider the ways in which it delayed the establishment of the almost contemporaneous Australian Institute of Criminology, and discuss the potential of a regional engagement that was only partly fulfilled in subsequent years. In doing so I also ask how adequate are interpretations of criminology's mid-century history as above all conservative, pragmatic, technocratic and administrative.