Besides getting on with our research, the three professors located in Canberra and Adrien Albert, when he came out from London, had to plan the details of their laboratories in the permanent building. In consultation with Florey, each of the existing departments had been allotted space: Microbiology was given three floor levels of the front West wing, plus a special animal house for infected animals; Experimental Pathology (Mackaness) was given the top floor of the front East Wing; Neurophysiology (Eccles) and Biochemistry (Ennor) were given one floor level each in the rear East Wing; and Medical Chemistry (Albert) was given the four floors of the rear West Wing (the lower two as a tall space designed to house production-size facilities). Other floors were left undeveloped until new departments were established and their Heads appointed.

I took my first study leave in 1953, leaving Canberra on 23 May and returning on 25 October. I travelled extensively in the USA, visiting many laboratories as well as museums and art galleries, until 23 August, when I flew to London. This was my first trip overseas since taking up my appointment in the ANU. On arrival in San Francisco, I stopped for a few days with Bill Reeves, who had visited Melbourne in 1951 to investigate the epidemiology of Murray Valley encephalitis, and got his advice on which labs to visit in the USA. According to my memory and my diary, I visited the labs of almost every virologist in the United States, learning much and often giving seminars, usually about myxomatosis. I also attended a 4-week long course on bacterial viruses at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. My diary for that trip, of some 100 pages, is housed in the Basser Library archives.

I returned to Australia via South Africa, stopping off in Entebbe, in Uganda, on the way. When in Entebbe I met John Cairns again, and we went on a wonderful drive to the Ruenzorei Mountains (the ‘Mountains of the Moon’) and looked over the scarp of the Great Rift Valley at herds of elephants and buffalo far below. I also persuaded John to come out to Australia and join my department. He came in 1955 and stayed until 1963, when he went to the United States to become Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.

I took my second study leave between 7 September and 14 December, 1957, this time travelling to England first, with a stop-off in Athens for a couple of days to see the ancient sights and the museums. Christopher Andrewes, at Mill Hill, spoke to me about the vacant chair in Virology at St Mary's Medical School, but I said that I was not interested. Besides visiting virologists in London, I had long talk with Florey, who told me that my department was the best one in the School and the only young one with a reputation in England (Eccles, of course, had a great reputation as a neurophysiologist). I spent some time with Allan Downie at Liverpool and met Keith Dumbell, later to be the world expert on variola virus. Then I attended a virology conference at Cambridge and visited the Porton biowarfare laboratories.

In Germany I visited Hannover, Tübingen, where the best virology lab in Germany was located, Paris, to see Lwoff at Institut Pasteur, and Jacotot, Vallée and Virat, all of whom were working on myxomatosis. One night I went to the Folies Bergère, which I thought were worth seeing once, but I wouldn't go again.

Next day I flew to New York and the Rockefeller Institute, where a substantial building program was in progress, with a Dome for lectures and accommodation for visitors (which I often used on subsequent visits). I had a long talk and dinner with René Dubos. He pressed me to keep up the study of myxomatosis since there was no other example of virus and host evolution in action. I then visited George Hirst, who was still working on influenza virus, and his colleagues, who were working on poliovirus and Newcastle disease virus. Over the next couple of days, I talked with colleagues of my early days at the Rockefeller: Rollin Hotchkiss, Cynthia Pierce, Dick Shope and Merrill Chase. I also spent an evening with friends Grogan and Janet O'Connell. The next day, I talked with Frank Horsfall and lunched with Jim Hirsch, then gave an Institute lecture on vaccinia genetics, which was followed by a good discussion. I enjoyed a talk with Max Theiler and his arbovirologists, then went over the road to the Sloan-Kettering. That evening (17 October 1957), I dressed in a tuxedo to give the Harvey Lecture: ‘Myxomatosis in Australian Wild Rabbits: Evolutionary Changes in an Infectious Disease’. This was followed by a pleasant dinner with many friends. During weekends I revisited the New York art museums and the Natural History Museum, and went to Carnegie Hall with the Graces (an Australian doctor long resident in New York).

As in 1953, I saw almost every virologist in laboratories in Philadelphia, Washington, Fort Detrick, Baltimore (where I met wartime malariologist Fred Bang again), Boston, Ottawa, Ann Arbor, Cincinnati (where I spent a day and evening with Albert Sabin), Urbana (where Salvador Luria, who received a Nobel Prize in 1969, advised me to use mutants of one virus for experiments on vaccinia genetics), Chicago (where Gwen Woodroofe, on study leave there, met me), Madison, Denver, Stanford University at Palo Alto (where I met David Regnery, who came out as a Visiting Fellow in 1962), San Francisco (University of California at Berkeley) and Los Angeles (where John Cairns was on study leave at Caltech, and I had long talks with him, Matt Meselson, Howard Temin and Harry Rubin). I stayed on at Caltech to attend an excellent conference on ‘Animal Cells and Viruses’, which was why I arrived back in Canberra just after staff had moved into the new building. At every place I stopped, I gave a lecture on myxomatosis, similar to the Harvey Lecture, except that at the University of California at Berkeley it lasted for three hours, with a ten-minute break each hour!

The ANU was so small in those early days that the heads of departments in the four founding Research Schools got to know each other quite well. In particular, Bobbie and I had come to know Walter Crocker, who was the foundation Professor of International Relations in the Research School of Pacific Studies, partly because he was building a house almost opposite ours in Torres Street. However, early in 1952 he had taken leave of absence to accept an appointment as Australian High Commissioner to India and in 1954 he resigned from the University to join the diplomatic corps. In 1955 he was moved to Indonesia as Australian Ambassador, and between 1958 and 1962 he moved back to India. He published eight books, each replete with critical and penetrating comments about matters on which he had a vast international experience (Fenner, 2002).

Early in 1956, Walter Crocker invited me to lead a group of three Australian academics to examine the possibility of providing Australian assistance to establish a medical school in Sumatra. My colleagues were Sydney Sunderland, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, and Norrie Robson, Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide.

Figure 5.5. Team assembled in Indonesia at request of Ambassador Walter Crocker to investigate the establishment of a medical school in Sumatra, July–August 1956

Left to right: H. A. Nasution (Education Ministry), Prof. S. Sunderland, Prof H. N. Robson, Prof. F. Fenner, Mr S. Dimmick (Australian Embassy) and W. Tooy.

We travelled around Indonesia, visiting five of the six existing medical schools, all in Java, and travelling extensively through Sumatra and to Bali, long before it had been spoilt by hordes of tourists. It was a fascinating trip for each of us. We submitted our report on 6 September, 1956 (Fenner, Sunderland and Robson, 1956), recommending that Australia should assist with the establishment of a medical school in Bukkitingi, inland in Sumatra, but this plan came to nothing when the students there supported an uprising against Soekarno. Eventually, Australia provided aid to establish a medical school in Penang, on the west coast of Sumatra. Sunderland took a leading role in this operation.

On 31 December, 1956, I was asked by Dr Leonard Cox, a neurologist in Melbourne who had a great knowledge of Chinese ceramics and had recently visited China, to join a group of some 20 Australian doctors who were invited by the Chinese Medical Association. The trip was to last a month and was all expenses paid. Most of the doctors were clinicians from Melbourne and Sydney. The two I knew best were Ted Ford, from my Army days, and Syd Sunderland, from our trip to Indonesia. We left Sydney on 8 April, and spent one day in Hong Kong (still a British colony), where we were entertained by Dr L. T. Ride (father of my Canberra friend David Ride) before taking the train to Canton. There, as everywhere else in China, we saw virtually no motor cars except those we travelled in; there were vast numbers of bicycles and many buses. After three days in Canton, during which I talked at length to the heads of the bacteriology and public health departments of the Canton Medical School, we caught the Shanghai Express but got off in Hangchow, where we went for a ride on the lake, with its many small temples, and in the evening saw the opera, ‘The Peacock Flies to the Southeast’. After a day at the Chekiang Medical College in Hangchow we took the train to Shanghai.

Here we spent six days and visited both the First and the Second Shanghai Medical Schools, the Serum and Vaccine Institute (of which there were eight in China), the public health centre and the Penicillin Production Plant. We also visited one of the four schools of traditional medicine, each of which graduated about 120 students annually. In contrast, the 35 Western style medical colleges each graduated about 600 students annually.

I was asked to give a lecture at the Second Shanghai Medical School, where the Professor of Bacteriology, Dr Yu Ho, had known Hugh Ward when both were at Harvard. I planned to talk, off the cuff, about Mycobacterium ulcerans. However, Dr Yu had to give the talk in Chinese, so I hurriedly wrote something and he translated it overnight. Next day, I gave my talk to an audience of about 150 (compulsory attendance of all staff) and my 19 colleagues with some difficulty, because the screen for my slides was a cotton sheet that swayed in the breeze. It was followed by a talk in Chinese by Dr Yu, but in contrast to my talk, he had his Chinese audience in fits of laughter, while my colleagues went to sleep.

We were on the train all day Tuesday and arrived in Peking at 8.30 pm. We were taken to the Hotel Peking, a very large and impressive building, where we spent ten days before returning to Hong Kong. I shared a room with Ted Ford and in our spare time we usually wandered around together. We were shown around all the wonderful sights of Peking, the Temple of Heaven, the Imperial Palace, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Avenue of Animals and the Ming Tombs. We spent a morning at the Peking Medical College and another at the Chinese Union Medical College (CUMC), where the Rockefeller Foundation had played a major role from 1917 to 1941. The Peking Medical College was 45 years old. It had 403 students in 1948 and 3,285 in 1957. The organization followed the pattern recommended by the Soviet Union, with five faculties: medicine (40 per cent of students), public health (20 per cent of students), dentistry and pharmacy (4-year courses with 15 per cent of the students each) and paediatrics (7 per cent of students). The CUMC had become a postgraduate institution, with 350 postgraduate students and three Professors of Microbiology, specializing in immunology, bacteriology and virology; it had an excellent library.

In parallel with the medical colleges was an Academy of Medical Sciences, which controlled four research institutes and 10 research departments. These were well funded but had difficulties in importing equipment from overseas. We were unable to visit the Academica Sinica.

May 1 was the great day of celebration for the People's Republic of China. Leading up to it, Chou En Lai hosted a cocktail party for all visitors from other countries. He gave an excellent speech and was a most impressive man. Next day there was a great celebratory May Day procession on Tienanmien Square. We had excellent seats in a grandstand just below the balcony on which Chairman Mao and his colleagues stood. For three hours there was a procession: first of children, with variegated costumes and different acts, releasing balloons or doves or waving flowers; then solid blocks of farmers and workers with floats, flowers and flags; then dancers and artists with elaborate dresses, jugglers and trick cyclists, mythical animals and Chinese dragons; and, finally, athletes in solid blocks of 600. They all gathered in Tienanmien Square and there was another great release of balloons, streamers and scrolls, and a barrage of rockets that bore parachutes with scrolls and streamers. In the evening we gathered again in the stand for a splendid display of fireworks. Altogether, this visit to China was a wonderful experience.

When booking my trip to China, I arranged to take two weeks' study leave so that I could visit Japan to talk with colleagues there who were involved in aspects of virology on which I was working. I therefore stopped off in Hong Kong on the way back from China, left my heavy luggage there and flew to Tokyo. My first stop, for orientation as well as technical information, was the US 106 Medical General Laboratory, where I talked with the virologists and gave the staff a talk on medical education in China. On the evening of 10 May, I had dinner with two of the 106 lab staff and two Japanese scientists with whom I had corresponded, Dr Tamiya and Dr Kitaoka, and arranged a tentative program. The next day, Kitaoka picked me up and I went to the National Institutes of Health, where we discussed rickettsial diseases and several virus diseases, including vaccinia. On Sunday, I took the train up to Nikko, where there are some famous temples, and had a very interesting day there.

The next day, Kitaoka took me to Tokyo University, where I met relevant staff and gave a lecture on myxomatosis, with alternate paragraphs by myself, in English, and Dr Matsumoto, in Japanese. On Wednesday, I travelled to Kyoto on the rocket train. It was crowded, but the service was still very good. Kyoto has some marvellous temples, with superb gardens. Dr Dohi was working on ectromelia virus and had some interesting ideas on A-type inclusion bodies. I stayed in a Japanese style inn, which was quite different from the European style in relation to bed, bath and breakfast. My last working day was at Osaka, where I met Dr Kamahora, who also worked on ectromelia virus, at the Research Institute on Microbial Diseases. On Saturday, Kamahora (whose mother was English) and Ishigami drove me to Nara, famous for its Great Buddha, temples and a fine museum. My Japanese hosts were very attentive with both entertainment and interesting meals, especially in the evenings. Very different from China, and a very interesting and useful two weeks.