ABSTRACT Alan Ward (1935–2014) delivered his inaugural professorial address at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, on 23 March 1988. Following his 1987 promotion to Professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1996, the lecture marked a milestone in his career, which to that point had included not only his influential study, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (1974), 1 1 On the significance of this text see: Vincent O’Malley, ‘Unsettling New Zealand History: The Revisionism of Sinclair and Ward’, in Texts and Contexts: Reflections in Pacific Island Historiography, ed. Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 154–65. but also important work on land reform in Papua New Guinea, the New Hebrides/Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. 2 2 For overviews of Ward’s career see: Michael Belgrave, ‘Obituary: Professor Alan Dudley Ward ONZM, 1935–2014’, New Zealand Journal of History 49 no. 2 (2015): 209–13; Peter Hempenstall, ‘Obituary: Alan Dudley Ward’, Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 50, no. 1 (2015): 89–92; and Ross Webb, ‘Ward, Alan Dudley’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 2023, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6w9/ward-alan-dudley (accessed 29 Nov. 2023). Hempenstall also offers a wider discussion of Ward’s place within trans-Tasman scholarship in ‘Overcoming Separate Histories: Historians as ‘Ideas Traders’ in a Trans-Tasman World’, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 4.1–4.16, DOI: 10.2104/ha070004. Some 35 years after its delivery and ten years after Ward’s death, the Journal of Pacific History now publishes the lecture (as retrieved from his papers and transcribed by his daughter, Ingrid Ward) in its entirety. This introduction highlights key themes from the lecture in the context of Ward’s career and subsequent publications that expanded on the issues raised in the speech.