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. 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 after receiving the highest pass in the Senior Public Matriculation Exam , where she decided to study science, in particular chemistry. Hill continued to work as a UQ Fellow through —30 on scholarship while she was studying her Masters 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. Australian universities did not begin awarding PhDs until with the first at UQ being awarded in Hill continued to explore the theory that Australia had once been covered from north to south by an inland sea, as evidenced by the fossil corals she found in Mundubbera.
She received a further scholarship, Senior Student of the Exhibition of for two years and the Daniel Pidgeon Fund award from the Geological Society of London which enabled her to remain in England until She 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.
Enter your Email address. Related Articles. October 30, Well, we all lived very modestly. Tram fares were, I think, threepence [3d] — about 3c in today's currency — and it only cost me 6c a day to go in and out to the university, so transport was no very great expense. We had a 'lunch-bringing tea-drinking association' in the women's common room, and we just contributed X pence per week to tea, sugar and milk supplies.
As we came back from lectures we made a cup of tea and we sat around sometimes at a table and had a little conversation, and then went off to the next lecture.
When you came to the university, did you know what you were going to do with your life? Did you want to be a geologist? I did know what I wanted to do: I wanted to be a scientist. I couldn't be a medical doctor — I didn't even bother to ask my family whether they could support me, because I knew they couldn't. By that time, to become a doctor I would have done one year in Queensland and then my family would have had to send me down to Sydney.
We had also done maths but no physics and biology, so because I felt I knew about biology I took geology as my extra subject at university. And having taken that just as an extra subject, I discovered chemistry to be vitally uninteresting compared with geology. That wasn't Bertram's fault, because I greatly admired him. It was simply H C Richards' presentation of the subject, and the subject itself — it has great intrinsic interest to one who likes to weigh the imponderable and look at things in an historical light.
Geology manages to combine both of those. And you can't measure anything, it's not measurable, whereas maths and chemistry are very largely measurement, which I find very boring.
Was geology more popular than other subjects because one went on excursions to various scenic spots? It was popular with some of the women. A few of the women went to the university — as you would expect and as I suppose they still do — for what you might talk about as social manners, to discover how to get on with the other sex, and I think it was a very good hunting ground for suitable marriages. Well, I wasn't interested in that aspect at that time, and that didn't enter into my considerations.
Intending to be a chemist, I simply took geology as a one-year fill-in subject because I didn't know anything about it and I had done biology. I was going to broaden my education. He was a man of complete integrity. I've never appreciated anybody who hadn't complete integrity, I might tell you now! I cannot even accept them as friends, really. He was vital and had quite a sense of humour; he was human but nevertheless adult and able to lead — all those things which you wanted in a man in a senior position.
That would have been more important at that stage of the university's development, given that there were only four professors. It was very important. It still is important now, and it is regrettable that so few professors have what I consider to be the right attitude [laugh] — which is rather parochial of me, I guess.
No, I tend to agree with you. There seems to have been at that time a greater sense of responsibility and also of authority among professors and senior staff. Steele, I think, was another one that acted with responsibility.
He did indeed. Those two men respected one another and worked together very well. Steele always understood Richards' point of view, and I am quite sure that Richards would get his own way with Steele simply because the two men were two of a kind. Richards had come up from Melbourne, and Steele was from England. Steele was an Olympian character — I understand that he'd had a very good record in explosives and munitions in England during the war.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, which was and still is no mean thing. Everybody felt a little reflected glory coming back from him, because of his achievement. Do you think he was too large for Queensland? He probably could have gone anywhere else. No, he was a model, you see, and he'd chosen to come to Queensland.
This was the thing he'd undertaken for his life's work. I suppose there is something immensely satisfying about beginning a university and establishing various faculties.
I imagine so. It is a sense of achievement, particularly when you build a thing up from the start and it turns into something before your eyes. Do you think those men would be happy, if they came back today, to see what had happened?
He was another man whom one could have a great admiration for. He too was dedicated. He saw his life's work as the department, and he tried to do his very best for it and for his students. He wasn't as vigorous as Richards, however, in pressing for more staff, that sort of thing — Richards I think always had his foot on the accelerator.
Bryan went on to be the first Doctor of Science at the university to have come up through the students. There were, of course, honorary Doctors of Science awarded at the first graduation ceremony, but he was the first graduate of this university to receive a Doctor of Science.
What other people in the university staff of the mids would stand out as major characters? I think Priestley and Michie — Priestley as a mathematician but also as an extremely humane character, very interested in the students.
For example, I was never really interested in maths and did a second year only because I had to, it was compulsory. After the maths examination I thought I'd failed, yet when the results came out I had got 60 per cent! I thought this was extraordinary, and everybody must have been marked very easily. Both Michie and Priestley were very interested in sport, and although we didn't have inter-university women's athletics we used to have an annual meet at which women competed against one another.
There were men's events going on at the same time. Priestley and Michie were always down acting as referees and starters and things like that, so you got to know them quite well. They were quite matey. Also, Priestley was very interested in hockey and he acted as sort of patron of the women's hockey club.
He used to come down and support us at interstate or intervarsity matches. All I can recollect for the women was hockey and tennis. I don't know, there might have been swimming. We didn't have athletics. Yes, more or less, and we went down in university vacations. The interstate matches were not synchronised, however, and because I played hockey for Queensland for several years I always had to go and get permission from Richards to be absent from my courses.
He was a bit sticky at one time, thinking I ought not to go because it would upset some course I was doing, but Freda Bage weighed in. When I told her I didn't think I was going to be able to go because it was going to be disadvantageous to my course, she said, 'Oh, I'll go and see what I can do.
I liked her very much. She was another person who saw her job as the prime interest in her life. She didn't just do it to get any money out of it; she did it because she wanted to.
She was the first woman lecturer, lecturing in biology before she became the head of the Women's College. And then, I think as head of the Women's College, she became the first woman elected to the University Senate. So she really was quite a character. She was one of those notable people whom you couldn't help respecting because they had a life's work and they intended to pursue it.
She had drive, and also great humanity and kindness, and she did everything she could for everybody. All her students got the best possible deal from her. Oh, surely. I actually lived in Women's College for a short time. My family were away somewhere and I thought that I'd take the opportunity to live in instead of fending for myself at home and rattling round in an empty house [laugh], and I enjoyed it very much.
The college life was quite a sociable and pleasant thing for me. Do you think the university was more a closed society in those days, a world of its own, more aloof from ordinary society than it is today? I don't think so. We certainly formed a world of our own, but people do that today, too. I think our place in the public eye was much the same as it is today — no great difference there. At 9 o'clock.
I went in to the university every day for my science lectures. The mornings were pretty full, and the afternoons had prac classes on them. In fact, at one stage the prac classes were so numerous that they cut into our sports half, and that meant that you got one of the men who weren't interested in sport to look after your experiments for you — which they did very kindly [laugh].
Wednesday afternoon was the sports half, you see, but Chemistry used to like to put on its lab periods at that time. In such a small institution I suppose students would have had a more balanced life at the university than perhaps they do today. Sport and things like that were social activities, to start with. Oh yes. I don't know why, but I had the idea that when you went to the university you did everything.
It was a chance to see what everybody else did — girls and boys. In those days, the girls went to separate schools and really didn't see terribly much of the boys, so it was all very interesting to go to a university where you shared classes with the boys. You have already mentioned that some women might have gone to university for an education in social manners.
I suppose this would have been the first opportunity, for both men and women, to enjoy mixing in adult society and in a society that was no longer segregated along by sex. Well, mostly I had lived at home with two brothers and four sisters, so that I did know a good deal about boys. I boarded at the Grammar School for some time while my parents were away, and then I stayed on after they came back. Because of the large family, Mother found it a bit difficult running everything at home.
So two of us boarded at the school and went home at the weekends. We have mentioned the geology excursions. I remember reading that one of the first was to Spicers Gap.
You would have seen a fair bit of south-east Queensland, I imagine, in your research and as a student. Was such an excursion quite a festive social occasion, or a serious research effort? It was both, really.
If you actually wanted to be a geologist and didn't just go to the university for the social life, the staff were able to see how you set about being a field worker in terribly primitive circumstances where you had to walk. You only used cars in order to get there, and after that you had to do your work on foot or by horse. I used a horse when I was working up in the Brisbane Valley — we were brought up with horses, you see.
The general feeling in a camp was a complex one, because you were keen to see the geology, you were also keen to enjoy being out in the open air and seeing the staff under different conditions — and seeing how you got on in the field, actually. And, of course, if you had the chance you played some sort of game.
People were full of high spirits and they would see how far they could throw the geological hammer [laugh] and that sort of thing. The excursion two years before I went to the university had gone up to Warwick, where it was so cold that there was a frost on the ground, ice all over the place, and they played ice hockey in the mornings!
So when I went up to Warwick I was hoping that that was going to happen, but instead of that I went down with flu there. Richards always went, and Bryan always went, in those early days. It was only later on that the professors didn't go and other people did it. Oh yes, they were terribly conventional.
Mrs Richards acted as chaperone always on those large excursions; she and Mrs Bryan generally went together. What other facilities besides the common room were provided for the students at that time? Were there adequate sporting facilities, for example? A men's sports union and a women's sports union arranged all the matches and raised money for the trips abroad, to southern States.
As to facilities, there were a couple of tennis courts which were used, I think, by staff and also by students, but most of the tennis was played on private courts — at houses of parents — and at the colleges.
The men's colleges all had tennis courts, and they invited tennis parties at the weekends. Many weekends were spent in that way, playing tennis. Hockey we had to play on the Domain, which was all that was left of the Government House Domain after the university and the Government Botanist had encroached upon it.
That never had any care taken of it. The potholes were not filled in, and the ball just wouldn't run true but sort of bounded from tussock to tussock. So Queenslanders were never very good at stick work, because they had to catch the ball in the air instead of on the ground. Nevertheless, we didn't worry about that, because playing was good.
The men had rowing sheds and that sort of thing. I suppose that those were also provided by the clubs through their own efforts to raise money. We only rowed in the Regatta, and then we rowed in fours and we also coxed for the men. The fours were women's fours, and I certainly rowed in a few of those. I enjoyed that, but often the boat was a little bit unbalanced because I'd be quite light [laugh] and the next woman would be a large woman with a lot of weight.
Nobody encouraged sporting events on Sundays in those days. Sunday was a Victorian Sunday in Brisbane. I remember reading in the Senate minutes of about that there was much consternation: an athletics meet had been held on a Sunday and people who supported the Sabbath were writing letters to the Senate.
They took it very seriously, even as late as that, which I was quite surprised to see. It was just taken for granted that you didn't do anything like that on a Sunday. You did it all on the Saturday. I think it was a family visiting day, and as far as I can recall various relatives came to visit my family at home. Do you think your examinations were harder in those days?
I suppose that because you had a term system and sat for the finals at the end of the year, there was a lot of stress at that time of year. Yes, because all the other attractions meant that you kept on putting off doing any work in the subjects you were taking until the very end.
The last term was a terrible term; you suddenly had to do the year's work in one term, which was no mean feat. I can remember working so hard that I couldn't sleep for the last two or three nights before the examinations — I was sitting up too late and my brain wouldn't stop!
Oh Lord, yes, a symbol of what I recollect now as absolute tiredness from making your maximum output. Sports, social life, everything went for those few weeks before the examinations. I made it a point to go through every lecture and be sure that I understood every lecture in every subject before I went into the examination, and that took quite a lot of doing in the third term. What did students do during their long holiday period at the end of the year? Did a lot of them seek work? I can't remember what I did the other years — probably got bored [laugh].
In families like mine there was certainly an incentive to make a little money. I didn't like to be taking all the time and not giving anything, and it seemed to be a good idea to get a job — which I did, and quite enjoyed it. Did organisations like the government make provision for student employment at the time?
In this case, my father and the State Government Commissioner of the time, John Watson, lived opposite one another and were great friends, and Greta Ferguson's father also knew someone in the Public Service, so when Greta knew that I was going to go in she said, 'I'll see if Dad can get me in,' and he did. Fathers did help when they saw you really wanted to get work; they weren't Victorian to the extent of saying no, you might not [laugh]. Society today sometimes perceives students as slightly indulged.
What was the attitude to them at that time? I think people were slightly more affectionate towards them, because the university was fairly new. It was something which Queensland had to build up and therefore it had people's support toward being able to stand on its own feet and be recognised. The students had a little bit of reflection from that.
Professor Hill retired from the University in late , returning to research her landmark Bibliography and Index of Australian Paleozoic Coral , which was published in A Dorothy Hill chair in Paleontology and Stratigraphy was endowed in her honor, and the Australian Academy of Sciences now bestows the Dorothy Hill Award for female researchers in earth sciences. Her colleagues at the University of Queensland created a 3D model of her rock hammer for an exhibition at the School of Earth Sciences.
0コメント