During the last few months of the war, Bill Keogh had travelled overseas and made arrangements with several funding bodies, notably the Nuffield Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to enable men who had been in the Directorate of Hygiene and Pathology during the War to gain overseas experience. He had visited and been impressed by René Dubos at the Rockefeller Institute, and after discussion with Burnet they had agreed that I should go to work with him, in what was then the leading medical research institute in the world. I received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship of £3,000 and a grant of £300 from Burnet to help cover travel costs. Before I left, Burnet told me that, when I had spent a year at the Rockefeller, he would provide me with a job at the Hall Institute, perhaps as Deputy Director, or, he said, there may be a job in ‘Florey’s new institute in Canberra’.

Before we left, I wrote to the senior virologist at the Rockefeller Institute, Frank Horsfall, suggesting that I would like to bring some ectromelia virus with me, so that I could make use of some of the more sophisticated equipment there. This was greeted with horror, because of the bad reputation that virus had of decimating colonies of laboratory mice, a matter on which I spoke at a conference in New York as late as 1980 (Fenner, 1981). Instead, knowing that Dubos was working on mycobacteria, I took some strains of the newly-discovered ‘Bairnsdale bacillus’ with me.

After shipping our heavy goods to New York, Bobbie and I went by the Aorangi to Vancouver. Travel was arranged so that the ship would stop for at least one day at several islands: Auckland in New Zealand, Suva in Fiji and Honolulu in Hawai'i. At each of these places we spent an interesting day travelling around the city and the country near it, all quite different from Australia or the countries of the Middle East, where Bobbie and I had been during the War. Burnet had written to Dr C. E. Dolman, Professor of Bacteriology in Vancouver, and he met us and took us all around Vancouver and its environs before we boarded the Canadian Pacific Railway to cross the continent. We had hand luggage only, and stopped off at Lake Louise for a day to see the mountain scenery, which was breathtaking. Then through the Rockies to the prairies of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Winnipeg to the Great Lakes. We got off in Toronto, where we met up with van Rooyen and Rhodes, authors of the book on medical virology that I have mentioned earlier (see Chapter 3). After an interesting day there we went south, spending a day at the Niagara Falls, then by train to New York.