The paper reflects on developments in leaving care policy and practice in Western Australia (WA) and nationally from the mid-1990s. The review of national and some international literature suggests that current Australian policy and practice shows a ‘systems stuckness’ that requires a more potent form of annual auditing and reporting of jurisdictional leaving care outcomes. The review of mostly Australian publications focusing on leaving care and the risk of homelessness includes reflections on recent developments in leaving care services in England, which recognise and restore relationship-based services for care leavers. Finally, the history, vision and initial impact of the Living Independently for the First Time (LIFT) Project, a case study of learning by doing, is outlined. The authors and their colleagues from the Department for Child Protection and Family Support (Midland District), Swan Emergency Accommodation (now known as Indigo Junction) and the Housing Authority of WA have collaborated to design and develop the LIFT Project. This initially unfunded action-research strategy involves inter-agency policy and practice designed to prevent homelessness of vulnerable care leavers.

I first met Willi Steiner in 1960 when I joined the library staff of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where he was a frequent visitor in his capacity as Assistant Editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals. He was extremely short-sighted and my first view of him was in the slightly undignified posture he had to adopt to read titles on the bottom shelves. But one of his many endearing attributes was that he never stood on his dignity and he would have been highly amused if he had caught his reflection in a mirror. Nor did he ever complain about his handicap beyond the very occasional rueful comment when he sometimes had to guess who had spoken to him. He did not allow it to deflect him from his many scholarly pursuits and personal interests and, happily, towards the end of his career, his sight was so much improved by an operation to his eyes that he only required spectacles for reading.

The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) was formed in 1969, during a period of great critical self-examination in the British library world. On the library scene as a whole, ad hoc remedies had, for some time, been applied to the deficiencies of a system which had evolved out of a more static age, and it was widely apparent that the whole machinery required overhaul and rationalisation at national level if scarce resources were to be effectively used, and if the expensive new technologies were to be fully utilised by libraries of all kinds and sizes throughout the country. The appointment of the Dainton Committee in March, 1969, to examine the role of the national libraries, was the Government's response to this situation and was the culmination of a series of earlier enquiries into both public and university libraries. The principal recommendation in the report of this Committee – for a unified national library organisation to administer several previously autonomous bodies – was clearly one which, if accepted, would affect all types of library, including law libraries. The earlier history of law libraries in this country had been one of relative isolationism – a reflection, perhaps, of the profession they served. But times were changing rapidly and many libraries were facing new challenges, often with inadequate staff or financial support. Increasingly, the problems could be solved only by sensible policies of co-ordination and co-operation between libraries. Clearly one of the most urgent tasks of the new Association was to establish co-ordinated policies for such co-operation and to formulate an agreed approach vis à vis national developments.