Editor's note: Last week we argued that a country gets the policy of the people it sources policy from. This week, the strongest proof of the principle we have found in the national archive: the fastest industrial project in Australian history, run by a veterinarian, delivering a world first almost nobody in this country has heard of (with a coda about what happened to the industry afterwards, which readers of this newsletter will find grimly familiar).

Innovation Spotlight: The Penicillin Sprint

Check your medicine cabinet. Somewhere in most Australian houses is a half-finished course of antibiotics, regarded with roughly the reverence of a box of paracetamol. In the winter of 1943 the substance in that packet was among the most valuable materials on earth, rationed ampoule by ampoule and reserved almost entirely for soldiers. And in April 1944 the first country in the world with the capacity to provide it to ordinary civilians was not the United States, which had the factories, or Britain, which had the science. It was Australia.

The science, in fairness, was partly ours already. Howard Florey, the Adelaide boy who turned Fleming's mouldy curiosity into a usable drug at Oxford, would share the 1945 Nobel Prize for it. But Florey's is the familiar Australian story: the brilliant one who had to leave. The story of how penicillin came home is better, and nobody tells it.

The vet in New Guinea

In 1943 the eminent public health man Bill Keogh, then the Army's director of hygiene and pathology, convinced the War Cabinet that Australia could not depend on allied supply and needed to make penicillin itself. For the job, the obvious candidates were chemists and industrialists. The man chosen was neither. Val Bazeley was a CSL veterinarian¹ then serving as a captain in the 2/8th Armoured Regiment in New Guinea, and he was selected, in the words of CSL's own historians, on a reputation for being able to get things done.

Bazeley flew to the United States in September 1943, a journey that required the Prime Minister's personal approval (in 1943, wanting to leave the country was itself viewed with suspicion). He toured the American manufacturers, was shown the new fermentation processes, and came home in December carrying rough sketches and brief descriptions of what he had seen. That was the technology transfer, in its entirety: one notebook.

Six weeks and a bottle plant

Back at CSL's Parkville site, Bazeley set the target of producing penicillin within six weeks, and hit it. Almost everything had to be invented on the spot: purification processes designed from the notebook, suppliers found, equipment commandeered, scarce raw materials scrounged, and soldiers awaiting discharge talked into joining the workforce. The plant itself was gloriously primitive. Thousands of flasks were inoculated with Penicillium notatum and shaken by hand, for days at a time, by men and women working around the clock. By Christmas 1943 the first ampoules of freeze-dried Australian penicillin had reached New Guinea. By February 1944, ten weeks after Bazeley stepped off the plane, the plant had produced enough to save a soldier dying of septicaemia at Heidelberg Military Hospital.

First in the world

By April 1944 CSL could supply both soldiers and civilians, a capacity no other country on earth yet had. On 3 May 1944 the Commonwealth gazetted the Control of Penicillin Order, less than a page long, scheduling the civilian diseases the drug could now be used against: septicaemia, meningitis, osteomyelitis, pneumonia, gas gangrene, tetanus. Every one of them a routine killer at the time; every one of them, from that page onward, negotiable. The bottle plant met the needs of Australia's own forces and supplied the American allies across the southwest Pacific besides. When the D-Day landings went in that June with two million doses behind them, and wartime survival rates for the wounded roughly doubled, penicillin became the most celebrated substance of the age. A shed in Parkville had quietly put Australian civilians months ahead of the celebration.

The mark of the pattern

Here is the part readers of this newsletter will recognise. The historians who reconstructed the sprint describe an achievement "typically ignored or under-celebrated in Australia", and a nascent antibiotics industry that was never allowed to become internationally competitive, run down through the post-war decades until, by the end of the 1970s, it had disappeared. First in the world in 1944; out of the industry entirely within a generation. The sprint was not a fluke, either. Bazeley spent the early 1950s in Pittsburgh as one of Jonas Salk's senior scientists on the polio vaccine, then came home in 1955 and stood up Australian production of that, too, before eventually directing CSL itself. Same man, same method, second world-class result.

Strip the story to its mechanics and it is the pattern this newsletter keeps finding at the bottom of every Australian triumph: an urgent problem, an institution that skipped the credential and picked the person with a reputation for getting things done, sweeping authority, a brutal deadline. Last week we called it handing the builder the pen. In 1943 the pen went to a tank-corps vet, and the country collected a world first in about twenty weeks. Then peacetime reasserted its usual sourcing habits, and the industry the sprint had built was allowed to die of neglect.

The packet in your medicine cabinet descends from Oxford and from the American fermentation tanks. But the fact that your grandparents could be prescribed it at all, before anyone else's grandparents on earth, descends from a hand-shaken bottle plant in Parkville that no plaque commemorates. The mould came home once. It knows the way.

¹ It remains the only occasion on which the national supply of a life-saving drug was entrusted to a man whose previous patients could not describe their symptoms.

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