samples of penicillin, and she gave him a sample of Gramicidin S. He arrived back at Oxford on 29 March 1944. Australia In May 1944, the Prime Minister, John Curtin and the Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Army, General Sir Thomas Blamey, visited London for the 1944 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference. At Blamey's request, Curtin asked Florey if he would visit Australia as an advisor on the use of penicillin. Florey agreed, but did not reach Australia until August 1944. He was accorded a hero's welcome. and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) by the University of Adelaide. In accepting the degree, he recapitulated his own career, and spoke about the need to make it easier for research to be conducted in Australia. Florey met with Blamey; the two men got along well and chatted for several hours. It ended with Blamey convinced that Florey was the man to guide a medical research institute in Canberra, and he put a proposal to Curtin on 24 October. It was quickly approved, but Curtin became ill, and he died in July 1945. Florey discovered that penicillin production was already underway in Australia at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) in Melbourne. In 1943, the War Cabinet had agreed to produce penicillin in Australia, and Colonel E. V. (Bill) Keogh, the Army's Director of Hygiene and Pathology, detailed Captain Percival Bazeley and Lieutenant H. H. Kretchmar to establish a production facility. They visited Peoria, and obtained penicillin cultures from Coghill. The first Australian-made penicillin began reaching the troops in New Guinea in December 1943. Florey was full of praise for their achievement, but disturbed that they had turned to the Americans for advice instead of him. "Am I not Australian?" he asked Keogh, "Have I not had some leading role in this thing?" Recognition Florey returned to the UK in October 1944, collecting the children from Fulton while en route. By 1945, penicillin production was an industrial process for the Allies in World War II. However, Florey said that the project was originally driven by scientific interests, and that the medicinal discovery was a bonus. He was created a Knight Bachelor on 18 July 1944, and he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Alexander Fleming, Fleming first observed the antibiotic properties of the mould that makes penicillin, but it was Chain and Florey