films for Shell, including The Forerunner which won awards at Cannes, Venice, London and Turin Film Festivals. In an article in 1957, he praised Shell for being "the first entry of a major private sponsor into the production and distribution of films in Australia on a solid basis". For Heyer, production was only the beginning of the process. He saw distribution as being a critical issue for documentaries and was committed to developing good distribution networks. In an interview in 1976, he agreed that Shell's commitment to distribution, with its libraries and its vans fitted with projectors, was one of the issues that prompted his move from the Film Board. John Heyer Film Company In 1967 he retired from Shell and set up the John Heyer Film Company through which he produced a series of documentaries including The Reef for the Australian Conservation Foundation. In 1977, John Heyer had done extensive research to establish the predicted area the Pandora wreck was in and launched a discovery expedition with the help of Steve Domm. Ben Cropp, a television film maker, gained knowledge of Heyer's expedition and decided to launch his own search with the intention of following Heyer by boat; in this way Ben Cropp found the Pandora wreck on the Great Barrier Reef just before John Heyer did. Later career Heyer lived in England for the rest of his life, but maintained a base in Australia, and regularly travelled between the two countries. In his later years, he continued to be in demand at conferences, such as the Australian International Documentary Conference and the Australian History and Film Conference, and other speaking engagements for his expertise and knowledge about documentary film-making in particular. While, after his initial start in the industry, his career was primarily focused on documentary film, he had a long-standing wish to film Xavier Herbert's Capricornia, one which he was not able to realise before his death in 2001. Style Academics and critics have written extensively on his influences, citing particularly his work with Harry Watt on The Overlanders (1944–1945), his training in the Grierson tradition under Stanley Hawes at the Australian National Film Board (1945 1948), and his interest in the British, Russian and American documentaries of the 1930s and 1940s. All of these combine to create what Moran describes as "a distinctive Heyer signature. On the one hand a populism and a commitment to postwar