Professional practice can be conceptualised holistically, and in fact during the 1990s the "Australian model" of integrated or holistic competence emerged empirically. This piece outlines that story, and then develops a more rigorous conceptual analysis of what it is to make competent practical judgements, through inferences, in context-specific and accountable ways (such as to one's peer group of professionals, or to the public). Current research interest in the Schonian swamp-like messiness of judgements (e.g. in clinical medicine) is drawn upon to advance a new epistemology of practice, which takes seriously the "know how" of real work situations, as the basis for a revival of Aristotelian "phronesis".