The overall plan of the permanent building had been decided when the founding professors met Florey in Oxford in July 1949, and a foundation stone was laid by Prime Minister J. B. Chifley on 24 October, 1949, to honour the memory of John Curtin, Prime Minister of Australia 1941–45. However, in the early 1950s, Canberra was struggling out of war-time restrictions on buildings. University House had been started in 1950 and was opened in 1954, but in late 1951 construction of the permanent laboratories of the John Curtin School seemed so far off that Council feared that the dispersed ‘School’, with departments located in Melbourne, Dunedin and London, would wither away. With the concurrence of Florey, it therefore authorized the construction of temporary laboratories. The contract was let to a local builder, Karl Schreiner, and the laboratories consisted of prefabricated wooden buildings, two being built adjacent to each other, with the overlapping eaves constituting the roof to the corridor. These were started in 1951; those for Microbiology and Biochemistry were ready for occupation late in 1952 and another double laboratory was built for Eccles and the Physiology Department in 1953. George Mackaness and a small group that had been working in Florey's department in Oxford came out as the embryo Department of Experimental Pathology to another double building in 1954. Two adjacent buildings temporarily housed the School Workshop. The permanent workshop was completed and occupied in September 1953, but it was to take another four years before the permanent laboratories would be completed.

Ian Marshall and Gwen Woodroofe moved from Melbourne to Canberra in early November 1952, to unpack and assemble the laboratory equipment that had been sent up by pantechnicon. One of my technicians, Kathleen Sutton, also moved to Canberra. Shortly after she arrived, she married Ian Marshall. Housing would have been much easier to arrange if they had married while still in Melbourne. Bobbie and I and the children moved up late in November 1952, in a Morris Minor and a Ford Prefect, to a University-owned house located at 3 Torres Street, Red Hill. Later, Bobbie's mother, who was then confined to a wheelchair, came from Perth to live with us.