A confluence of interests

Abstract Building on the work of McNamara and Lo Bianco ( McNamara, 2001 ; McNamara & Lo Bianco, 2001 ), this article interrogates further the institutional and intellectual factors that led to the establishment of the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia (ALAA), which was officially constituted in 1976 at a conference organized at the University of Newcastle. It aims to show that, while both ALAA and the tradition of applied linguistics it fostered in Australia had certain distinctive features, the creation of the association was also reflective of a wider set of circumstances and imperatives. In order to illustrate this, the discussion looks firstly at the broader international context before considering the factors that contributed at the more local level to the formation of ALAA. In so doing, it seeks to provide an enhanced appreciation of the generic and specific influences at play in ALAA’s origin story, and of their relative importance. More generally, the study presented here contributes to the growing body of work in “Applied Linguistic Historiography,” the importance of which was advocated by Richard Smith (2016) .