My motivation for the topic of this issue was instigated by the succession of natural disasters witnessed in early 2011, and my personal perplexity in coming to terms with (that is, naming, signifying) the visual display of the suffering of others. It began with the January floods in South East Queensland, followed by the February earthquake in Christchurch, and concluded with the 11 March Japanese tsunami resultant from the 8.9 magnitude quake which struck off the east coast of Sendai, and which continues to be newsworthy based on the consequential Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. As spectator to trauma—exacerbated by the television media’s choice to continuously loop the scenes of devastation—bearing witness to these events engendered a peculiar form of private trauma in itself. Even the phrase ‘to bear witness’ implies transference in the act of witnessing, that not only is the visual ‘held’ by the eye for the duration of the image, the subject of that witnessing is in some way ‘carried’ by the witness.