I knew Gordon from early Hall Institute days and he came to Canberra several times to give seminars here. In 1962, I tried to recruit him as Reader in Biochemical Microbiology, but the Hall Institute was still too attractive. Then, in 1968, he was appointed as my successor. I moved to CRES in 1973 and we became really close friends in 1991, when he came back to the School as a Visiting Fellow and occupied the office next to mine. Since then we have always had morning coffee together and discuss the woes of the modern world.
Rod was a senior physician in the 2/2 Australian General Hospital when I was there in 1942 and after I went to New Guinea he was deeply involved in looking after volunteers who had been given malaria at the LHQ Medical Research Unit. After the war he became Dean of the Monash Medical School, and in 1964 he was responsible for recommending the award of my first honorary degree (MD). I visited Monash University intermittently after that and, in April 2004, I gave the first Roderick Andrew Oration there.
Stephen, an Englishman, worked with René Dubos a year after I did, and was subsequently appointed to the Department of Experimental Pathology in JCSMR. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1966 for his work in immunology, but in 1965 he had decided that he wanted to get away from reductionist science and transferred to my department in that year, to work on human ecology. He subsequently transferred to the new Department of Human Biology and in 1975 to CRES, where he worked until retirement in 1990. In 1991, following the interest expressed by several people in the audience when he gave a lecture at Questacon, he set up a non-governmental community body, the Nature and Society Forum, of which I became an early member and later a patron. I regard him as perhaps the most creative younger scientist whom I have known well (thus excluding Burnet), and he and his wife Rosemary have been among my closest friends, especially during the last decade.
Ruth was the nursing sister at Canberra Boys' Grammar School and a good friend of Bobbie's. Since Bobbie's death and her retirement to a cottage near the Yarralumla shops she kindly invites me to have lunch or dinner with her and other friends.
Jack was a senior public servant and a member of the tennis group that I had joined as soon as I was settled in Canberra. In 1960 he was appointed to the ANU as Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, and from 1968 to 1973, a period coinciding with my term as Director of JCSMR, he was Vice-Chancellor. From the mid-1960s, we were very close friends, and he and his wife Jess played bridge with Bobbie and me every Saturday night for over a decade; we visited Jess every weekend after Jack died in 1984.
Coming from a South Australian farming family, Walter had extensive experience in the British diplomatic corps in Africa during the war. In 1948, Copland persuaded him to join the Research School of Pacific Studies as Professor of International Relations. We got to know him well because he built a house almost opposite ours in Torres Street, Red Hill. He transferred to the Australian diplomatic corps in 1952 and initially filled important posts in India and Indonesia. In 1956, he invited me and two colleagues to Indonesia for three weeks to advise him on the best location for a medical school in Sumatra. Then, in 1960–61, he organized a six-weeks visit for me to virology laboratories all over India. After he retired in 1970, he went back to his farm, but in 1973 he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia; I stayed with him once at a time when he was living in Government House. Eventually he retired to a house very near the beach at Grange, an Adelaide suburb on the coast. For many years I used to visit him there whenever I went to Adelaide; he always plied me with penetrating questions. He died in 2002 at the age of 100.
David had joined Jack Eccles as his first PhD student in 1954. He rose to be Professor of Pharmacology when that department was created in 1973 and was appointed Director of the JCSMR, 1989–92. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Science in 1965 and appointed President, 1986–90. He and his wife Laurie were always good friends and he hosted many lovely dinners which we enjoyed at his home in Campbell. In 1999–2001, we collaborated in producing a history of the first 50 years of the John Curtin School.
Max Day was born on exactly the same day as I was, one year later. For many years, Max and his wife Barbara and Bobbie and I would celebrate our birthdays with dinners, alternately at our respective homes. In the early 1950s, he worked in CSIRO Entomology on the transmission of plant viruses and he was the first person with whom I collaborated in laboratory work in Canberra. I used to come up from Melbourne to work with him on the mechanical transmission of myxoma virus by mosquitoes. Later he became a member of the CSIRO Executive and then Chief of the CSIRO Division of Forestry. Appointed a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1956, he became very much involved in environmental problems in Kosciusko. He was an early member of our tennis group and we played on his court in Melbourne Avenue for over twenty years, until he sold the house in 2002.
Jack was older and more distinguished than the other early professors when he joined us in Canberra in 1954. I got to know him well when he was President of the Australian Academy of Science in 1957–61 and I was Secretary, Biological Sciences. In the early days, I also used to play tennis with him and some of his children in their home just down the street from ours and Bobbie was very friendly with his wife Rene.
Marc Faunce came to see me shortly after he came to Canberra in 1957, enquiring about research work in the JCSMR, which at that time had no connections with Canberra hospitals. He was a first class physician, attending no less than five Governors-General and three Prime Ministers. He also examined me once a year and more often if necessary, essentially he was my GP until he retired. Then we used to visit each other on alternate week-ends, in Wanniassa and Red Hill. After his colon cancer became incurable in 2004, he stayed for several months with the former chief pharmacist of the Canberra Hospital, Enid Barnes, and I used to visit him there at least once a week. He was cheerful until the very last days. I still visit Enid and see two of Marc's other close female friends there every Monday afternoon.
Born in Manchester in 1927, Bryan came to Australia in 1966 as physician to the ANU Health Service, in which he developed the concept of ‘Wellness’, established walking trails around the ANU campus, and served until 1993. He then became very active in the Nature and Society Forum, where I came into closer contact with him and his wife Anne. He was a skilful writer on popular science, which included books on nutrition and microbiology and letters to the Canberra Times and the Guardian Weekly.
I had met Adrian, a plant virologist, on a visit to Rothamstead Experimental Station in England in 1965. He joined the Department in 1966, went back to England in 1969 for a few years and then came back, with my support, to a senior position in the Research School of Biological Sciences, ending up as a Professor and a Fellow of the Academy of Science. Our common interest was viral taxonomy, and as an animal virologist I found his insights very valuable. One of his sons was an expert balloonist, and he and Adrian took me for a wonderful flight over Canberra.
I first met Alfred, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, when I went to the Hall Institute in 1946, and I got to know him quite well then. After he retired in 1958, at age 65, he joined the Department of Microbiology as a Visiting Fellow, funded by an NH&MRC grant. He had separated from his wife and lived alone in a flat in Northbourne Avenue, and we used often have dinner together. He returned to Germany in October 1962, to a position in Tübingen; he died there in 1973. I was the executor of his will, which included a donation of $36,231 to establish the Gottschalk Medal of the Australian Academy of Science.
Alan had worked with Burnet from 1936 to 1939 and then spent six years working as a pathologist in the 2/9 Australian General Hospital. I saw quite a lot of him when we were both in Port Morseby and we collaborated in a long paper on infections with Salmonella blegdam. Bobbie and I really got to know and love the family when we looked after them while he and Mavis spent a Keogh-organized year overseas just after we had come back from the Rockefeller Institute. Each of us always visited them whenever we went down to Melbourne, and we remained very good friends with Alan, Mavis and the children.
As I mention in Chapters 3 and 4, Bill Keogh played a major role in my career. We were friends, but he was a reserved man and much older than me, and I don't know if he had many ‘close’ friends, although he greatly influenced the careers of many army medical officers. However, he and fellow Adelaide University medical graduate of mine, John Funder, Sr., went on a couple of long drives with me through the countryside in Victoria.
Kevin joined the Department of Microbiology in 1957, as a PhD student with Stephen Fazekas. After postdoctoral studies in Canada he came back to the Department as a Research Fellow and later rose to be a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Immunology. After several years as a professor in the University of Colorado in Denver, where I visited him several times. In 1993, he returned to Canberra as Director of the John Curtin School and was very supportive of my work in the School.
My GPs after Marc Faunce retired, Jim and then Cam, have been good friends. Since Jim's retirement, I always seem to be running into him and Doris at various ‘Friends’ events, at the National Library and the National Portrait Gallery.
George had spent a few years with Florey in Oxford before he came out to Canberra in 1954 as Head of a small Department of Experimental Pathology. He carried out some excellent work on cell-mediated immunity in intracellular bacterial infections, for which he was elected FRS in 1976. A couple of years after Colin Courtice had been appointed Head of Experimental Pathology in 1960 George accepted a chair in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Adelaide. We became friendly because we both had an interest in cellular immunity. Then, in 1965, René Dubos, with whom he had spent a study leave year, invited him to be Director of the Trudeau Institute for Medical Research in Saranac Lake. Later, in 1976, he became President of the Squibb Institute for Medical Research and went to live in an enormous converted barn in New Jersey. Bobbie and I visited him in Saranac Lake and also in his ‘barn’.
I first met Barrie when he came from England to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute as a Rockefeller Foundation Visiting Fellow in 1951. He came to Australia again in 1962, to be the foundation Professor of Microbiology at Monash University. In 1968, he moved to Edinburgh for 10 years, then came back to the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science in Adelaide. He officially retired in 1985, but continued to be very active in investigations of various aspects of Q fever. I have known him throughout this period and seen him most often during the last ten years. I see him and his wife Diane whenever I visit Adelaide.
In 1953, I visited the research institute in Entebbe, Uganda, primarily to see John Cairns, who joined the Department of Microbiology two years later. Cedric went to Entebbe in 1954, and joined my department as a Research Fellow in 1956. His work on the pathogenesis of infectious diseases was of special interest to me and he worked his way up the ladder to become a Professorial Fellow in 1968. In 1972, he was appointed Professor of Microbiology at Guys Hospital Medical School in London, and proceeded to write a book on the pathogenesis of infectious diseases. I visited him several times in London and also in his lovely home, a couple of hours by train south of London. All their four children were in Australia and he and his wife Vicki came out periodically to see them, but in 2002 they decided to come out here permanently. They used to come for gossip and a drink on alternate Sunday evenings; Vicki had to move to a nursing home a year ago but Cedric continues to come.
Geoff was Executive Officer of the US Educational Foundation (Fulbright scholarships) in Canberra from 1950 and Bobbie became a close friend of his wife Margaret. In 1965, he became Warden of Burton Hall, at the ANU. After he retired and after Bobbie had died and I had moved into the extension of the house, I initiated the pattern of drinks and nibbles with them, which changed when Margaret had to move permanently to Morling Lodge, a nearby nursing home, because of severe arthritis. Gwen Woodroofe, Geoff and I would then have a drink at my place and then drive up to Morling Lodge and have another, and more gossip, with Margaret. Both Geoff and Margaret died in 2004.
Professor of Medicine in the University of Melbourne, Richard resigned from that position in 1999 to come up to Canberra as Chief Medical Officer of the Commonwealth of Australia. I met him when he was developing procedures for handling a bioterrorist attack with smallpox virus. We lived close to each other and he and his wife Carol often invited me to dinner at their home. They also used to come to my weekend drinks and nibbles.
In the early 1980s, when I decided to publish Veterinary Virology, I enlisted the help of several overseas veterinarians, but I also wanted an Australian co-author, and Michael, the first Professor of Veterinary Virology to be appointed in Australia, was the man for the job, and we became close friends. As an expert in equine virology, he made valuable contributions to the original book and all subsequent editions.
Bob set up the New South Wales Blood Transfusion Centre during and after the War, and in 1973 became Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales. I first got to know him through the Australian Academy of Science and later the Medical Research Advisory Committee of Papua New Guinea. We became very close friends and served together on various Academy committees. I would always call and see him, and often stay overnight with him, if I went down to Sydney during the 1970s.
Hugh's brother, Dr Keith Ward, was Government Geologist in South Australia and I knew him in prewar years. I got to know Hugh when he was Professor of Bacteriology at the University of Sydney. During the 1950s, he used to ask me down to Sydney to lecture to his medical students and I would stay overnight with him, at a time when I was never asked to lecture to undergraduates in ANU. A very unassuming man, he had a remarkable record in World War I; as a medical officer he was awarded the Military Cross with two bars. He, Mac Burnet and Bill Keogh exerted considerable influence on medical research in Australia in the early post-war years.
Wendy was another friend I inherited from Bobbie. As well as periodic dinners with her and John at their lovely home in Shackleton Circuit, in Mawson, since Bobbie's death in 1995 Wendy is the most generous friend anyone could dream of in terms of dropping in beautiful cooked meals for me every now and then.
David's father, Harold White, the creator of the National Library of Australia, lived close to us and regularly invited Bobbie and me to his garden parties. His eldest son, David, a Sydney medical graduate, was one of my first PhD students and later became Professor of Microbiology in the University of Melbourne. He was an outstanding teacher, and when I decided to produce Medical Virology as a student's textbook, I persuaded him to be a co-author, and we collaborated in all later editions and in Veterinary Virology. Naturally, we became very close friends. He and his wife Marjorie came to Canberra at the time of my 80th birthday celebrations and David was one of the three speakers at the celebratory dinner.