Beginning again

Abstract

The journey to putting together this inaugural issue of the Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics is a surprisingly long one. I originally founded the journal in 1999 back when I was a young academic at Griffith University in Australia where I taught Japanese and linguistics. I was nearing the end of my PhD thesis, and I was passionate about promoting applied linguistics in Australia, hoping to make the journal a platform through which this could be accomplished. There was a very small editorial board at the time, made up predominantly of colleagues in my department at Griffith University, and ironically, it was in electronic format, perhaps one of the first journals in the field to do this. Open access as a publishing concept didn’t exist then, and publications typically went through major publishing houses, or like the Australian Journal of Applied Linguistics of the time, by small groups
at universities and other academic organisations.