'Contributions to this issue of Aboriginal History range over the following topics: senior public servants in the state protection administrations, the voices of Aboriginal workers and mission residents in remembering and advocacy, institutionalisation and the sociospatial historiography of conflict, and the relation between policy and popular exhibitions. The diversity of encounter and the multiple impacts of violence, removal, isolation and surveillance are presented in fine-grained and quite revelatory scholarship that we are honoured to circulate.' (Preface introduction)