Professor Dorothy Hill AC, CBE, FAA, FRS

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Dorothy Hill was a world-renowned geologist and palaeontologist who specialised in the study of corals.

In 1960, she was the first female professor appointed at an Australian university and in 1970, the first female president of the Australian Academy of Science. She fostered a professional research culture at Australian universities at a time when any student interested in postgraduate study invariably went overseas to the United Kingdom or the United States. Hill’s efforts were instrumental in reshaping Australian universities to become world-class research entities.

Hill was born in Brisbane in 1907, and educated at Coorparoo State School and then at Brisbane Girls’ Grammar, where her aptitude for scholarship was very apparent. She won prizes in English and history and excelled at sport, but her passion was the sciences. She enrolled at the University of Queensland before it had a medical faculty and so opted to study geology. The science and the fieldwork of this discipline intrigued her and it was then that she commenced her work on Australian corals. She graduated with first-class honours and won the university’s gold medal for outstanding merit.

To further her studies, Hill went to Cambridge University in the UK, and although she found her time there stimulating, she was a devoted Queenslander and returned home in 1937. She took up a research fellow position at her old university, where she remained for the rest of her distinguished career. Hill and her large cohort of students advanced the study of the Great Barrier Reef exponentially, in addition to making many other contributions.

Hill received many civil and professional honours and awards and is memorialised at the University of Queensland in the Dorothy Hill Engineering and Sciences Library.