On his return after two years he married Valerie Checkland. In 1951, Daniell was sent to Korea to cover the Korean War and the reconstruction for the United Nations, shooting both newsreel footage and stills. He made the trip four times before the weather was suitable for filming. One of the more memorable sequences required a 16-mile return walk through rainforest to the location, carrying the camera gear. Daniell was unemployed until Kayser asked him to be his assistant on Charles Chauvel's epic adventure Sons of Matthew, shooting second unit footage on the Lamington Plateau, in Queensland. He got a job as assistant to Carl Kayser on a feature film but it collapsed for lack of money, and the producer went to jail. When he returned to Australia, work was again scarce. No doubt with Fred's help, Daniell got his chance when he was hired by the Netherlands Information Service in 1945, accredited as a war correspondent and dispatched to the Philippines and then to Tokyo to cover the surrender. He did a business course, but took a job as an office boy at Fox Movietone, where his duties included keeping the film editor away from the rum bottle when deadlines approached.ĭaniell found it hard to get a break as a cameraman at Fox Movietone, but he was tall and could carry the heavy and cumbersome camera cases and batteries, so he gradually gained experience as an assistant. Muriel wanted John to become an accountant, possibly because she had seen the precariousness nature of work in the film industry. When his uncle John was one of the camera operators for Charles Chauvel's Forty Thousand Horsemen, filmed in the Cronulla sandhills, young John accompanied him for the day. John was fascinated by cameras and when he was not at school he would go to the studio with Fred. It was natural for John to pick up a camera early and he shot his first motion picture footage at nine on a 9.5 millimetre Pathe camera belonging to Muriel, who was annoyed when she found that he had used up her precious film stock, but forgave him when the film was processed and it was perfectly exposed. Muriel's family was well off, having started a company that became Bundaberg Sugar, and the business interests seem to have sustained the family through the Depression, when there was enough money to send John and his brother to board first at Shore and then Geelong Grammar. Fred left the marriage soon after John was born, and subsequently married twice more.
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