[2] Clifton Vaughan Holland was born on 21 June 1914, the eighth of ten children, and was raised on his family's farm on the Mornington Peninsula, south-east of Melbourne.
He studied civil engineering at the University of Melbourne and then worked for the Commonwealth Oil Refineries for three years.
He joined the army when World War II broke out, and served in the Middle East, Greece and the Pacific, becoming a lieutenant-colonel.
His first contract was to build a shed on a property in western Victoria owned by a farmer named Malcolm Fraser, who would later go into politics and become the Prime Minister of Australia.
[10] In 1942, Sir John Holland married Emily Joan née Atkinson, with whom he had a daughter and three sons.