Gill was born in
Mount Eden, Auckland. In December 1935 he married Kathleen Winnifred Brebner (1912-) in
Warrnambool,
Victoria with whom he had three sons and a daughter. His eldest son was
Adrian Gill, a leading
oceanographer and
meteorologist, who predeceased him by three months.
Education Gill was educated at
Gisborne High School before going overseas to study the
Licentiate of Theology at the
Melbourne College of Divinity. He then gained a
Bachelor of Arts at the
University of Melbourne and a
Bachelor of Divinity at
Melbourne College of Divinity.
Career Gill first worked for the
Baptist Union of Victoria as a director of their youth and religious education departments. However he became increasingly interested in science and in 1938 he published his first paper, on Yeringian
trilobites in the
Victorian Naturalist. Much of his career was focused around the
National Museum of Victoria, where in 1944 he was made an honorary associate in palaeontology. His views on
evolution were incompatible with those of the Baptist Union and in 1948 he resigned from the ministry and became the museum's Curator of fossils, succeeding Alexander Robert Keble (1884–1963). He went on to be appointed assistant director in 1964, deputy director in 1969 and remained at the museum until his retirement in 1973. During his career Gill's work covered a broad range of scientific disciplines, publishing approximately 400 scientific papers in his lifetime. His papers covered a wide range of subjects and many had a particular focus on the landscape of western and coastal Victoria, and the
Warrnambool region. He kept comprehensive field notes on sea level changes and marine processes in the area in his geological notebooks. In retirement he became a research fellow in the
CSIRO Division of Applied
Geomechanics, and continued to work on
coastal processes. Dr Gill, left his research about the region with
Deakin University Library in Warrnambool. ==Honours and awards==