It is good to be back in the office after the events of the past year have kept many of us away from our workspaces, colleagues, and the tools of our trades. When I open my office door, I see shelves upon shelves of books dating back to the very first days of my social work academic career, and even before then, back through the years of practice and years before that as a student. I have been a member of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) since my student days, which means I have accumulated three decades plus worth of Australian Social Work (ASW) hard copy journals. Minus those that have been “borrowed” over time by students and colleagues, I have a close to full collection. I admit to the odd nightmare of an industrial bin being brought to our campus, and me coming to work one day to find all my books and journals gone, deemed a health or safety hazard. I often ask myself why I am so attached to these books and journals and realise that they hold the source of knowledge about our profession, the history, and the critical developments over time that are recorded in multiple pages. The knowledge history has been built steadily by social workers who have taken the time to document what they have seen and heard, both through formally designed research and less formal reflections on practice (see He [2021], where she reflects on the COVID-19 experience in China). Social work in more developed countries has paved the way for growth in countries that have traditionally relied on less professionalised ways of providing assistance to those in need. Trevithick (2021) categorised knowledge into theoretical, factual, and practice knowledge allowing us to interrogate how we acquire knowledge and what form the knowledge takes. I recall one of my early lecturers reminding us that a social worker is nothing without a curious mind. When we ask questions, we have ways of exploring answers, in the form of research and evaluation. When we want to know why humans behave in the ways that they do, we have observations and assessments to help form explanatory theories. As we generate research, develop new theoretical understandings, produce models and new approaches, expand cultural horizons, and dive deeper into what we think we know well only to find that we knew nothing, we search for ways to share the fruits of our curiosity. We move towards those places where knowledge is stored and disseminated – places like this Journal and others. We like to think that we have the world at our fingertips and that we can search out knowledge easily with advances in technology. We can watch the events of the world unfold before us through the lens of traditional and social media. However, as the world closes in with the ravages of a global pandemic, it may become harder to bear witness through international travel to the ways that social work plays its way out in different countries and cultural contexts. Our reliance then moves back to the written word in the hope that publications will provide visual impact in the mind’s eye as we immerse into the stories of research and practice. Awareness of international developments and events is so much more at the forefront of consciousness with media and journalism committed to either hiding the truth or exposing it – dependent on political will and sources of power. Social work has always been a profession that has strong global and international roots, and the connections built up over many decades between countries have enabled oppressed voices to be heard despite the efforts of governments to silence them. Social work is also a profession that has a history of bravery when it comes to reflective practice. What this means is that social work and human service academics and practitioners are prepared to explore controversial areas of interest through research that are often untouched by those in cognate disciplines. The richness of our literary history relies on this bravery, and the willingness to reach into areas of practice that may otherwise remain hidden, particularly in countries that hold information tight. Angelina Yuen-Tsang, in her Forward to the new edition of International Social Work: Professional Action in an Interdependent World by Healy and Thomas (2021) commented: “We may have sometimes ignored the need to critically reflect on our own cultural biases and presumptions and to ensure that we respect diversity and embrace cultural differences in our professional actions and collaborations” (p. xvi). This point is worthy of consideration as we engage with the articles in this Issue of ASW.