My first priority was to attract a number of well-qualified senior staff members, and this was successful, Stuart Harris commencing work as Professor of Resource Economics in February 1975, and Peter Young as Professorial Fellow in Applied Systems Analysis in January 1975. David Ingle (Dingle) Smith was appointed as a Senior Fellow in January 1976, to be responsible for the course-work degree of Master of Environmental Studies as well as research in the Hydrology/Water Quality Program. However, in 1976, University funds had ceased to grow, for the first time in its history, and the prospect of appointing enough research fellows to support the work of these senior staff members looked bleak. Two events offered some relief. The first was an agreement with the Director of the JCSMR to transfer to CRES, with funds, the Urban Ecology Group of the Department of Human Biology in that School (leader, Professorial Fellow Stephen Boyden). The second was the recognition by the Heads of Schools Committee, on the initiative of the Director of the Research School of Biological Sciences, Professor R. N. Robertson, of the plight in which the freeze on funds had caught CRES. An additional continuing grant of $50,000 per annum allowed three additional research fellows to be appointed.

In mid-1976 two distinguished Visiting Fellows, Dr H. C. Coombs, founding father of the ANU, and Dr A. B. Costin, pioneer of ecological studies in the Kosciusko National Park, joined CRES as long-term Visiting Fellows, supported by external funds.

Because of the need to use research assistant and research fellow positions in CRES to support the major research activities of other senior staff members, I worked without such support and thus spent a large part of my time on ad hoc problems rather than a major research project. On appointment to CRES, I resigned from membership of the Epidemiological (Standing) Committee, National Health and Medical Research Council, but during the next few years I continued or accepted membership of several other national and international committees concerned with environmental problems, as follows:

My lecturing and writing activities became increasingly diverse, often through committees set up by the Australian Academy of Science (see Chapter 8). However, I continued to take an interest in the work of the WHO Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program and attended many meetings of its expert committee on poxviruses (see Chapter 10). I also continued my book-writing, producing, with co-author David White, a second, completely revised, edition of Medical Virology, published in 1976; later that year the Second Report of International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses. In 1977, I teamed up with a former colleague, Adrian Gibbs, in producing a book of essays by 15 experts, Portraits of Viruses: A History of Virology. In 1978 Lloyd Rees and I co-edited The First Twenty-five Years, a history of the Australian Academy of Science.