Dorothy Hill was Research Professor of Geology, University of Queensland 1959-1972 and served for six months as President of the Australian Academy of Science, Canberra in 1970. She was the first female elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA) and published widely on palaeontology, stratigraphy and geology.
Joan Wiffen was a self-taught palaeontologist who greatly advanced knowledge of fossil reptiles in New Zealand. Wiffen, who described herself as ‘a rank amateur, a Hawkes Bay housewife in fact, with no scientific training, just … a great deal of curiosity’, made some of New Zealand’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Despite a lack of formal education or specialised equipment, Joan’s excavations of fossil remains in a remote Hawke’s Bay valley produced the first evidence that dinosaurs had once lived on the New Zealand landmass.