Anyway with that connection, it wasn't long before Wayne thought I should also be a Board Member. So I had a lot of fun serving the Board under two Chairmen. And then when recently I became Dean I was asked to join many, many other Boards and so I thought I should move on. But it’s been great fun.

Ann Westmore: How did you defend the [NHMRC] expenditure on the overseas Fellows?

James Angus: Almost by saying that it was equivalent to a PhD scholarship. It was only for one year. If you looked at surgical research in the country, it was a very under-resourced area. And here was a group - a critical mass under one roof – where they could share so much. So it was a great investment. OK it was foreigners, but they were going to obviously be the larger family, the world and the patients were going to benefit. So why not? We've got to keep saying those sorts of things. It’s a global village.

Laurie Muir: Perhaps Wayne should tell us how many countries have backed people that this Institute has trained, and how they are doing?

Wayne Morrison: Well that's a statistic that we don’t really have accurately. We’ve loosely said that more than 200 people from around the world have trained [at the Institute]. There aren’t many countries that I can think of that haven’t been part of that group. They’ve virtually come from every continent. Many of them have come from Third World Countries but the great majority are from the elite places of the world. It’s a reflection, I think, certainly in the early years, of the standing of this place. People from America and Japan who also were putting their toe in the water with early microsurgery, saw this place as the epicenter. As one of your early slides showed, 10 out of 120 or so delegates [at the 4th International Microsurgery Symposium] had trained here at St. Vincent’s.

That ratio continues in a way. Many of those people have gone back and established big centres and have become internationally recognised people. I think it's been a great vision of Bernard that overseas people have gone back as great advocates, not only of this place, but of Melbourne, Victoria, and Australia in general, and St Vincent’s of course. It’s been a very good PR exercise and something, I think, that was very visionary at that time. In surgery at least, we’ve often gone overseas to train and with the concept that we’re from a small place that was not worth anything. It’s often not until you go overseas and test the ground that you get a feeling for where you are in space. And I can honestly boast that St Vincent’s, at that period, was very much world-class and people who came here experienced that and went back.

So Laurie, the numbers are a bit rubbery, but they are in the hundreds. Most of them have come for one year, nowadays they come for two years. Most of them now are self-funded which again is a reflection of how much they value the place. Previously we did offer scholarships.

It needs to be appreciated that people from many countries can't get their own funding, and I think there is an obligation for better-funded countries and centres to have money made available through a Foundation. Particularly, it needs to be acknowledged, it’s one thing Australia has done for international medicine because a small amount of funding can make a huge difference to people from Third World countries. So that needs to go on. But the quality of the applicants has continued and, in fact, it’s improved.

Bryan Egan: Can Wayne explain whether the Bernard O'Brien Society is still functioning, which meets at the International Society of Reconstructive Microsurgery? [53]

Wayne Morrison: Certainly it hasn't really functioned in recent times, Bryan. It demanded some tower of energy to really be the organiser of that and many people ran it for a while and when it was a smaller group it was functional. But the numbers really are getting too big. We certainly need an international meeting, just on the basis that we know each other, and the Bernie O’Brien Institute is the linchpin. But it’s not under the banner of the O’Brien Institute. But that was a very good concept and a very important bonding period.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine