Audrey Joins Me in Boston

One feature of the Harkness Commonwealth Fund Fellowship which contributed a great deal to the time we shared in the US was the provision that Fellows were required to spend about six weeks at the end of the academic year touring the US. They were also required to write an account of what they had learnt of the country and its inhabitants. Two of the other Fellows, Ted Mayne and Walter Shepherd-Owen, and I had jointly bought a new Ford Tudor (which the Americans called "Two-door", which it was) for the purpose of touring the country. We used the car at different times. After Ted and Walter had made their trips Audrey and I made a journey of some thousands of miles from Boston to New York, Chicago, Washington, Miami, New Orleans, El Paso, Phoenix, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Yosemite, Reno, San Francisco, Crater Lake, Mt Larsen, Corvallis (Oregon) and back to San Francisco from where we made our return to Australia by BCPA.

We learnt a lot about the country and its people during our journey and still have fond memories or our experiences. We enjoyed the friendliness of the people, the wide ethnic diversity of the population who all exhibited great pride as citizens of their nation, the diversity of the landscape (verdure of the eastern States, aridity of the south-west), majesty of the Rockies and the Grand Canyon, the vulgarity of Reno, the immensity of the cities, the prodigality of food at the steak-houses at which we ate, but above all we remember the sense of being privileged to visit a nation full of people of various ethnic backgrounds where all had the opportunity to profit from initiative and hard work.

Bureau of Meteorology