Heather Hill arrived at WGC in August 1963 from Scotland and finished 6A (7th form) in 1967 as Dux and gold medallist.

She went on to study languages and philosophy at Victoria University planning to become a teacher or lecturer, hopefully after spending time in France honing her French skills. However, instead, with her studies completed, she migrated to Canada (Montreal) and worked in a French Canadian organisation involved with third world development projects and issues. Her French (thanks to the NZ education!) was so good, she was thought to be Parisian French – it did take a while before she could fully understand “le joual”, Canadian French. In 1974, she returned to New Zealand and after a job at Foreign Affairs working with Colombo Plan students from S.E. Asia, she undertook social work training through the Department of Social Welfare, ultimately working as a medical social worker at Hutt Hospital.

In 1979 travel beckoned once more – in Asia and Europe, including working in Germany as a secretary, and two years working in London. From her time as a social worker, Heather had become fascinated with the idea of dance therapy, a non-verbal way to work therapeutically with clients. She returned only briefly to New Zealand before heading for Australia in 1983 to study dance therapy at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education, now part of University of Melbourne.

From 1985, she worked as a dance therapist mainly in mental health, disability services and aged care. She was involved from early on in the efforts to establish a dance therapy professional association and became first President of the Dance Movement Therapy Association of Australia (now Australasia) in 1994. Her special love was the work with people with dementia and this led her to doing a Master of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her thesis (completed 1995) was on the experience of dance therapy for a person with dementia. In 2004, she completed a PhD on the topic of person-centred dementia care. During all these years, she was also involved with developing curriculum for dance therapy programs, teaching dance therapy and, since receiving her doctorate, training care staff in person-centred practice. She was commissioned by the University of Stirling, Scotland to write a book for care staff called “Invitation to the Dance”, has written many articles and has chapters in several books, including the Oxford University Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing and “The Art of Dance/Movement Therapy” (published in several languages).

While “kind of” semi-retired now, she continues to be involved in issues to do with ageing and with dance and to work on special projects. She made two lecture tours to Japan (2012/2014) and wrote a book on dance and dementia, for translation into Japanese. She spent ten weeks last year in Singapore (spread over three visits), teaching person-centred creative dance to staff working with people with dementia at Alzheimer’s day centres. She was supposed to continue the work this year, but of course Covid has paused this for now.

Dance therapy has proved to be a wonderful and satisfying profession for Heather. While it seems quite a long way from the starting point of languages and philosophy, all of these have in their own way been relevant to her work… which is essentially about communication and humanistic values.

Heather lives in Yarra Glen, Victoria, Australia.  She would love to hear from any of her former classmates.  If you would like to make contact you're welcome to email wgc@wgc.school.nz.