[4] The Great Depression ended this avenue of employment, however, and for some years he travelled the country, finding work in a wide variety of occupations including as a farm labourer, opal miner, circus hand, potato digger, and shearing shed roustabout.

During World War II, Niland was rejected for military service due to a heart condition – he worked as a shearer under the Manpower Directorate.

[1][5][7] By January 1944 both Niland and Park had each written radio scripts for Australian Broadcasting Commission's serial, Children's Session, and collaborated on a Christmas play, The Disappointed Dumpling.

She also completed his research into the life of Les Darcy, releasing it in the form of a biography, Home Before Dark (1995), that was written with her son-in-law Rafe Champion.

The Darcy biography is drawn from Niland's immense archive of books, photographs, clippings, letters, unpublished memoirs and taped interviews about the ill-fated boxer, supplemented by subsequent research.

(A hero to many Irish Australians, Darcy had died of an infection in America at the height of his sporting powers, only a few months before Niland's birth in 1917.)

Picking up where Niland left off, the Park-completed biography is a carefully compiled chronicle of Darcy's short life as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries.

Niland was burdened with a chronic heart condition (it had prevented him from serving with the Australian armed forces during World War II), and he died at the age of 49.