I took my membership exam in 1967, four years after graduation: three one hour essays, a long case, several short cases and a brief final viva in the presence of the whole Board of Censors. It was tough and the failure rate was high. I was keen to spend my working life in a teaching hospital but there were few salaried positions. It was my mentor Stan Goulston, a future president of the College, who, knowing that I had a medical science degree in Microbiology, suggested a career in Infectious Diseases.

I trained in London for three years before returning to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital as its Microbiologist. Led by John Forbes, superintendent of the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, Melbourne, we created the Australasian Society of Infectious Diseases in 1976. Clem Boughton (Prince Henry Hospital), Peter McDonald (Flinders Medical Centre) and I then began creating a program for College trainees in our field of medicine. We planned two streams; the first for physicians working purely in clinical practice and the second for those who wanted to take the RCPA exams as well. They have both become very popular.

There were predictions that infectious diseases would be conquered by the end of the twentieth century. That, of course, didn't happen; more than twenty new infectious diseases, some of which became pandemic, were identified during my working life. In a tertiary referral hospital we were mostly concerned with hospital-associated and opportunistic infections, the latter becoming very relevant during the early years of the HIV epidemic.

My forty years of specialist practice was a pleasant mix of clinical care, laboratory development, teaching and administration. I could not have wished for better.