Dorothy Hill

Dorothy Hill, (10 September 1907 – 23 April 1997) was an Australian geologist and palaeontologist, the first female professor at an Australian university, and the first female president of the Australian Academy of Science. Education Dorothy Hill was born in Taringa, the third of seven children, and grew up in Coorparoo in Brisbane. She attended Coorparoo State School, and then won a scholarship to attend Brisbane Girls Grammar School. She received the Lady Lilley Gold Medal, and the Phyllis Hobbs Memorial Prize in English and History, in 1924. Hill was an enthusiastic sportswoman, who pursued athletics and netball at high school, and was an accomplished horsewoman at home. At the University of Queensland, she participated in hurdles, running, hockey and rowing. She played on the University of Queensland, Queensland state and Australian universities hockey teams. While at Cambridge University, she took a pilot's licence. Following high school, she considered studying medicine and pursuing studies in medical research; however, at the time, the University of Queensland did not offer a medical degree, and the Hill family could not afford to send Dorothy to Sydney. Fortunately, she won one of twenty entrance scholarships to the University of Queensland in 1924 (after receiving the highest pass in the Senior Public Matriculation Exam), where she decided to study science, in particular chemistry. She chose to study geology as an elective, and under the guidance of Professor Henry Caselli Richards she graduated in 1928 with a First Class Honours degree in Geology and the university's Gold Medal for Outstanding Merit. Hill continued to work as a UQ Fellow through 1929–30 on scholarship while she was studying her Master of Science, conducting research in the Brisbane Valley on the stratigraphy of shales in Esk and sediments in the Ipswich basin. She began to collect fossils after she was introduced to them in the local limestone of a farm, where she was holidaying in Mundubbera. She was put forward for a UQ Foundation Travelling Scholarship by Professor Richards to study at the University of Cambridge's Sedgwick Museum, in residence at Newnham College, just as the Great Depression was taking effect.