Congratulations to Jon Piccini, University of Queensland, who has been awarded the 2017 Sir Francis Forbes Prize for Australian legal history for a paper delivered at our Christchurch conference last December. Jon’s paper, ‘“A new government with new policies and new attitudes”: The human rights ‘breakthrough’ in 1970s Australia’ was praised by the judges as engagingly presented, ‘It provides a comprehensive literature survey of human rights thinking in Australia over several decades. Significantly it resonates with current human rights debates – indigenous rights and the sovereign state – with respect to Indigenous recognition in a way that makes it a worthy recipient of the prize.’