This issue of English in Australia is a special edition drawn from presentations made at the 2015 Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA) conference held at The University of Queensland in September 2015. The conference was co-convened by Lindsay Williams and Garry Collins. The conference theme, Linguistics, Literature and Verbal Art: Inheritances and Developments, was inspired primarily by the work of Professor Michael Halliday. His wife, the late Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, formerly a linguist at Macquarie University, Sydney, sadly passed away on 24 June, 2015.