Politics and the law have been core components of Australians’ connections beyond colonial and national boundaries. Life stories offer vivid insights into the ways colonial careers, the rule of law, governing men, political ideologies and movements, and repressive policies all connected residents and visitors in Australia to other parts of the world. Julie Evans’ careful scrutiny of the writings of Edward John Eyre forms the basis of her argument that colonialism not only impelled officials to move around the empire, it undergirded connected hierarchical structures that unified the British colonies even as they varied. Margaret Allen looks at governance from the perspective of subaltern lives restricted by racist immigration policies, particularly the White Australia Policy in its first decades. The men whose stories she has recovered, such as Otim Singh, divided their lives between Australia and India, often at the cost of separation from their families and restriction on their movements, as well as assumptions about their inferior masculinity. Cindy McCreery unpacks accounts of the 1867–68 visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to Australia to demonstrate that British royalty had its own particular transnational connections, and that imperial loyalty to Britain itself was one part of colonials’ sense of themselves as globally situated. The dedicated internationalist R. G. Watt, Nicholas Brown reveals, exemplified the early twentieth-century belief that bodies such as the League of Nations and the United Nations offered the best hope to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the world wars. Through his organisational building, talks and promotion, Watt transcended his Australian location and modest social status to further internationalism as an ideology. These chapters reveal individuals whose lives linked Australia to other parts of the world through authority in its multiple facets.