Walter Crocker, who in 1958 had moved back from his position as Australian Ambassador to Indonesia to become, for the second time, Australian High Commissioner to India, arranged for me to go to India under the Colombo Plan. My mission was to visit virology laboratories throughout the country, meeting staff, giving lectures and attending the annual conference of the Indian Virological Society. I had a wonderful trip all around India, by car and plane. When in New Delhi I was the guest of Walter and Claire Crocker and attended several of their delightful dinners. One practice that I noticed was that as soon as the meal was finished, Walter would go to a side room with the various guests with whom he wished to have a serious talk and Claire would look after the other guests, male and female.

My first official visit was to Hyderabad, where over a period of five days I attended the annual meeting of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), gave a lecture on Genetics of Animal Viruses and talked at length with many medical scientists, including long sessions with Dr C. G. Pandit, Secretary of the ICMR. Then I went to Aurangabad, where I met up with an American couple, a Mexican and an Israeli woman and shared a taxi with them to the Ajanta Caves, 70 miles away. Next day we went to Ellora Caves. Two most enjoyable and interesting days. I then flew down to Trivandrum, in Kerala State, where after looking around the Art Gallery and some of the temples in the morning I went to the Medical College and looked specifically at the level of training of staff and quality of equipment, as matters on which the Colombo Plan might be able to help.

Throughout my travels, I was taken to see local museums, art galleries and temples, a wonderful experience for someone who had never been to India before. My official duties took me in turn to the Pasteur Institute of South India in Coonoor, the Christian Medical College in Vellore, to Bombay, for three days, where I visited the Haffkine Institute, the Grant Medical College and the Indian Cancer Research Centre. I spent three days in Poona, then the major centre of virology in India, giving three different lectures at the Virus Research Centre, the Poona Medical College and the Armed Forces Medical College. In Calcutta I had the very interesting experience of staying with the renowned British scientist J. B. S. Haldane and the statistician P. C. Mahalanobis, as well as visiting and giving lectures at the Infectious Diseases Hospital, the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine and the Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research. By chance, Mac and Linda Burnet were just coming home from the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm and we met briefly in Calcutta. Then a week in New Delhi, where I stayed with the Crockers part of the time and lectured at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Maulana Azad and the Lady Harding Medical Colleges and the Patel Chest Institute, at Delhi University. As well as talking with scientists at all of these institutions, I had long interviews with Drs Patel and B. D. Larcia, a member of the Indian University Grants Commission.

During the final week I went to the Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education and Research and Patiala Medical College in Chandigarh, the Central Research Institute in Kasauli, the Agra Medical College and Lucknow University, with side trips to the temples of Patipah Sikri and the sacred sites at Banaras. After I returned home, I wrote a formal report on the trip for the Department of External Affairs (Fenner 1961), the main headings being Medical Education and Research, Weaknesses in Medical Education and Research, Virus Research in India, Postgraduate Education of Indians in Australia and Organization of Visits by Medical Scientists.

While in India, I had arranged to spend a few days in Thailand and then go to Siemrep in Cambodia to look over Angkor Wat (20–23 January). There were very few tourists at Angkor Wat. I wandered around and sometimes used a hired motor tricycle. The whole place, especially the carvings on Angkor Wat and the delicate apsaras, were wonderful.

I was elected to The Royal Society of London in 1958, and in 1960 I was invited to give the Leeuwenhoek Lecture there. I decided to take a full year's study leave and to take Bobbie and Marilyn with me. It was the only full year's study leave that I ever took. At the time, Sir John Cockcroft, the first Master of Churchill College, was being considered as Chancellor of the ANU, a position in which he served from 1961 to 1965. Presumably because of this association, I applied for a Visiting Fellowship in Churchill College, then in its infancy. I found from the Churchill Review, Volume 37, 2000, that although a Visiting Fellow for only one year, I was nevertheless a Founding Fellow of Churchill College.

We put the car on blocks and rented our house to Joe and Sue Johnson (I ascertained that £35 a week was a ‘fair rent’). I stayed in University House from 9 September, 1961, and Bobbie and Marilyn went to Adelaide and stayed with my mother. I visited Sydney and Melbourne, saw many old friends and did practise runs of my Lecture in both places, before flying to the United States, arriving in San Francisco on 1 October, 1961. I spent about a month crossing the States, visiting Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, Seattle for a few days, New York and Princeton, where I spent three days at a Macy Foundation Symposium, Johns Hopkins University, Chapel Hill in North Carolina, Cornell, Harvard and Yale Universities before flying to London on 31 October. Then, on 2 November, I attended a symposium at The Royal Society on Mechanisms of Viral Infection, at which I gave a short paper, and in the afternoon I was admitted as a Fellow and signed the ancient Charter Book. Next day I went to Cambridge and settled into our flat there, one of the very few permanent brick buildings in Churchill College at the time—George Steiner and his family was in the other. My first job was to buy a small car, we had decided on a blue VW Golf.

Bobbie and Marilyn flew to England in mid-November and I collected them from London airport in the new car. With advice from local women, we arranged for Marilyn to go to a small primary school close to Churchill College.

I went to the laboratories of the Department of Pathology but found them much inferior to my own labs in Canberra for work with cultured cells. I therefore decided to use most of my time investigating myxomatosis in Britain and in continental Europe. The story of this is set out in the next chapter, in the description of the production of the book Myxomatosis by Fenner and Ratcliffe (1965).

We enjoyed Cambridge, especially the walk from Churchill to the city in spring. We also drove all over England and Scotland. One notable trip was over the Christmas break, when, on a day when there was hardly any other car on the snow-covered road, I drove across to Birmingham, where David Catcheside was Professor of Microbiology. He was being considered for the Chair of Genetics in the John Curtin School. On behalf of the Vice-Chancellor, I discussed the idea of a Research School of Biological Sciences in the ANU with him. Subsequently, he accepted the Chair of Genetics and concurrently acted as Advisor for the Research School of Biological Sciences. In 1967 he became the first Director of this School.

I visited many laboratories all around Britain. One memorable visit was to the Laboratories of the Chester Beatty Research Institute at Pollard Woods, where Sydney graduate Jacques Miller was in the process of discovering the immunological function of the thymus gland, by delicate operations on newborn mice.

In May 1963 Ross Hohnen, the ANU registrar, made arrangements with Pro-Rector K. I. Ivanovic of Moscow State University (MSU) for selected ANU senior staff to go to there as Visiting Fellows for a period of six weeks. He told me that the Pro-Rector had issued an invitation for me to go this year. I had already arranged to spend most of February on study leave at conferences in USA, and felt that I could not spend six weeks in Moscow, but agreed to go for a month. I spent a week in London and then flew to Moscow on February 27 and was met by Dr V. Agol, head of animal virology at MSU and Miss Galya Lipskaya, a recent graduate in biochemistry who acted as my guide and interpreter. I realized why they had invited me when I was introduced to Academician Belozersky, Professor of Plant Biochemistry, who was in charge of the development of a new Institute of Molecular Biology at MSU; a new building was almost completed in the grounds of MSU and the Department of Virology was to be part of this Institute.

All expenses were covered by MSU, which also arranged visits to museums and art galleries and evenings at the opera and ballet, in both Moscow and Leningrad. I stayed at the Budapest Hotel in Moscow and the Hotel Europe in Leningrad. Both were centrally situated, comfortable and quiet, and in both of them service in the restaurant was unbelievably slow and the food mediocre. I maintained correspondence with Agol and Lipskaya for several years. My intention of meeting them again at the International Virology Congress in Moscow in 1966 was frustrated, because I had an attack of appendicitis. However, I was able to meet Agol several times on later trips to Moscow.

There were several Research Institutes of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences on the outskirts of Moscow. I visited several of these and usually gave a lecture in each and two in MSU. I could talk with the younger scientists directly in English, which they spoke remarkably well considering none had ever been outside the USSR. Lectures had to be spoken in paragraphs that were translated, and usually took over two hours, but I found that by speaking without a text and talking slowly and clearly, many members of the audience understood what I was saying and the task of the translator was simplified. Facilities for slide projection were often poor and some of the ‘blackboards’ and ‘chalk’ (lumps of stone) impossible.

Galya and I went up to Leningrad by train, in the same sleeping cabin (‘equality of the sexes’, she said). I remember clearly the seemingly endless birch forests. We went to the ballet the evening after we arrived: Prokoviev, Romeo and Juliet, very good. Two excellent art galleries, the Winter Palace with a great collection of classic paintings, Rembrandt, Titian, Rubens and a host of others, and next day to The Hermitage, a marvellous collection of French impressionists up to about 1914. Ballet again that evening: Spartacus, music by Katchuchurian. I don't think that it is commonly on display outside Russia. The opera next evening, Rimsky-Korsakov's Skopsve Maiden, about the time of Ivan the Terrible, was splendid.

Back in Moscow, I had lunch with the Australian Ambassador and his wife, Mr and Mrs Jamieson. The next day I went to the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Oncology, which has a Laboratory of Virology, with George Svet-Moldavsky in charge. After a splendid lunch with caviar and sturgeon, we had a long conversation on Burnet's character, not so much as a scientist but more generally (he was a local ‘god’). Dinner the last evening was with Academician Belozersky and a large number of guests, in a large flat in a large palace of MSU. Much vodka and wine was imbibed, but as I found after I had got back to Canberra, also a dose of Giardia. I had an interesting trip back, over the Himalayas from north to south, to arrive in New Delhi.

I produced a ten-page report on my visit, comprising a general overview of the arrangements, an outline of visits to scientific institutions and lectures, comments on the structure of their medical course and the virology institutes operated by the Academy of Medical Sciences, research facilities and availability of modern equipment, their problems in getting chemicals used for tissue culture, and the potential for continuing exchanges of staff, both ways.

The Pan-Pacific Science Congress was held in Canberra over the 1970–71 Christmas–New Year break. Because of my interest in environmental problems, I attended that congress. Another interested group that held their meeting at the same time was the Far-Eastern Prehistory Association. Because of my early interest in Aboriginal prehistory, I was invited to take part in an archaeological tour of south-eastern Australia. A group of some 40 prehistorians, including all those knowledgeable about Aboriginal prehistory, embarked on a bus tour that included most of the sites of interest in southeastern Australia, including northern Tasmania. On the bus trip down from Canberra to Melbourne, John Mulvaney spoke at length and explained the background, and at each site that we stopped an expert explained the special features of anthropological sites of interest. I found it a most fascinating experience, especially seeing sites in Tasmania, as well as Kow Swamp, Lake Mungo and the rock shelters at Devon Downs, on the River Murray, which I had visited as a university student.

Sir Macfarlane Burnet had a special interest in Papua New Guinea, because his son, Ian, had been a patrol officer there. In 1962, he responded to a request from the Australian Government to act as Chairman of a new committee, the Papua-New Guinea Medical Research Advisory Committee. He asked my close friend, Bob Walsh, to be Secretary, and me to be a member of this committee. In 1966, it was replaced by Council of the Institute of Human Biology, and we all continued to serve on this until an indigenous committee took over in 1973. These meetings involved two annual trips to Papua New Guinea. Sometimes we met in Port Moresby, but usually, when the Institute was set up, in Goroka, where the Institute (later named the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research) was located. Sometimes we travelled to the Highlands. One memorable visit was when Lord De Lisle, Governor-General of Australia, visited Mount Hagen. He travelled around standing in an open car, a tall figure dressed in a white uniform and with a large feather in his hat. Around the show ground danced myriads of New Guineans, short in stature, naked except for skirts, body and face brightly painted and with magnificent bird of paradise plumes on their heads.