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 geo - graphical) 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.