Festschrift initiative: celebrating Emeritus Professor Ruth Fincher AM

Professional and society journals often publish obituaries in which colleagues reflect on and celebrate the lives of others—in this instance, geographers— who are no longer with us and who have been closely associated with a discipline and sometimes also with a country or region. Less often do journal editors and contributors curate collections of works that recognise and reflect upon the sustained contributions made by colleagues who are still with us. Festschrift offerings such as the kind I am thinking of are almost unheard of in this journal. We begin to remedy that gap now because such offerings show colleagues’ influences on us and the discipline. To those ends, this inaugural offering celebrating Ruth Fincher initiates what I hope will be the first of many in coming years.