We looked a lot – and Hec Orams was involved – at various mucosal diseases in the mouth and I think we published several hundred papers (more than 400) over all. It was a fairly active group.

I had a lot of support from Tony and ‘Atki’ and was told to get on with it, sort of thing. I think most of us put more time into research than clinical teaching which was pretty unusual and I felt was a privilege.

We had quite a lot of NHMRC funding, and Tobacco Research Foundation grants, Dental Research Foundation grants and grants from the local Cancer Council. It was quite a healthy trickle of money.

One of the other measures of success, was the visitors we had. They came from the US, UK, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, and Israel for example. It was quite an exciting thing and I think that was a visible sign that what we were doing was assessed by others as worthwhile.

Mike Morgan: Certainly, it’s a very research intensive School. Eric keeps quoting that this is the most productive Dental School in bringing in research funding. That’s not new but it’s certainly grown in the past 10 years.

Garry Pearson: Mike, is it true that Victoria gets more Australian Dental Research Foundation grants than any other state?

Mike Morgan: It’s likely. It has a long lineage in research.

John Harcourt: It’s also had considerable success through ADRF competitions which fund vacation scholarships for research by students. Many of the papers submitted (from Melbourne) have been in the top one or two. Also they had considerable success at the recent research meeting in Sydney.

Mike Morgan: We’ve always had a high involvement in the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). That involvement continues and individual researchers in the School have been winning the top IADR research award.

Peter Reade: I think there have been times when the University of Melbourne has contributed more than half the total number of papers given at IADR meetings in Australia.

Mike Morgan: Yes, we had more research papers at the recent IADR meeting than any other university.

Peter Reade: One area of research in which we have taken a lead is in chronic head pain management, an interest which has been internationally recognised. We’ve had a multi-disciplinary group involved since the 1970s which has included psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, physiotherapists, and a few dentists.

There have been a lot of papers produced and the last PhD thesis I supervised was on dental phobic illnesses, and the work is still continuing. The group is sort of humming along, though we lost our social worker and psychologist.

Ann Westmore: Does that sort of research interact with teaching in a formal sense?

Peter Reade: Yes, it does. There are lectures that are based on the work we are doing.

Henry Atkinson: Going back a bit, in our research grants from the NMHRC and ARGC, as it was then, we had sufficient funds to employ a speech therapist, a sociologist, a histologist, a mechanical technician and two electronic technicians. So for about seven years we were getting literally up to millions of dollars into the Department for continuous staff and equipment.

John Harcourt: [The employment of] David Thomas was a result of the latter end of that. He’s been interested in facial morphology and jaw movement-type research which has been ongoing for many years.

Peter Reade: We should also mention something in which Gerry Dalitz was involved. The ADA provided us with a grant to identify people from their dental state. I undertook, with the help of the Forensic Institute, to get a full-time position to look after forensic odontology and that’s flourished. The group, headed by Professor John Clement,[108] participated in recognition of tsunami victims and supplies a service to the forensic institute, the disaster group and the police. It’s a pretty active group at present.

Witness to the History of Australian Medicine