GREAT BARRIER FILM.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 5 (Supplement)

GREAT BARRIER FILM.

BY ANNETTE KELLERMAN. MERMAIDS—AND SHARKS. Secrecy has surrounded the making at Australia's "front door" of the first talking films to be acted under the sea. They have been made by Miss Annette Kellerman, the famous Australian exOlympic swimmer andi film star, and will shortly be released in Britain and the Empire. The "sets" were real coral gardens below the great Australian Barrier Reef. Four Torres Strait natives with harpoons swam around on continuous guard to keep the numerous, sharks from the dainty mermaids and sea nymphs taking part in the filme, which were of Miss Kellerman's submarine fairy etories. "We believe we have a new idea in talkies and that we have found one of the few remaining unfilmed. corners of the world," Miss Kellerman, who has been staying in Paris, told a correspondent. "We did not want anyone to know what we were doing till we had succeeded —and that is why the secret of our two years away from civilisation has not been revealed before. Cloudy Spume From Coral. "Our difficultiee were immense. Not only were there sharks, but the coral insects periodically give off a spume which prevents all picture taking. We once had to wait four months before we could take a 'shot.'

"We lived in a boat and camped from one coral isle to the next along a great pa>t of the 1200 miles of the Great Barrier Reef. I lived in a bathing costume for a whole year. You've no idea how uncomfortable clothes can be when you have left them off for so long. "My husband, Jim Sullivan, was cameraman and the joke is that although ho took all these pictures at the bottom of the sea in a special apparatus, he can't swim a stroke! My longest time under water was three minutes and 14 seconds, which I believe is a world record for a woman. Off to Japan Shortly. "The firet time our Australian native boys saw me with a mermaid's fieh tail, they got quite excited, and one asked

me: 'Where can I find more ladies like you?' I jokingly told him we had lots i'l European waters. 'I'm going right there as soon as I've saved up enough, , he said seriously. "We made four pictures —eea fairy etorjes taken from my book, 'Fairy Tales of the Southern Seas.' They should appeal to children as fairy tales and to grown-ups as wonderful glimpses of undersea life.

"One is about a little girl stolen by the mermaids and tells of her 'education' under the sea.

"We never had any trouble from the sharks, although there were eo many, and I forgot all about them after a few weeks. I expect when they saw our fish tails they took us for a new kind of fish.

"Once we have arranged for the. showing of our pictures, we're off to Japanese waters to film an undersea Japanese story."