Susanne Hill

The Hill family's involvement with the story of Richard Henry began during a sailing holiday in Dusky Sound in 1974. Their 17-foot Aston longboat, named after Richard Henry's trusty old dinghy Putangi, was lifted over the mountains by helicopter into the Vancouver Arm of Breaksea Sound. With their two children, then aged ten and five, the Hills spent three weeks sailing among the starkly beautiful fiords and islands of Dusky and Breaksea Sounds and on the formidable Acheron Passage. In this adventure, Susanne and John Hill used Richard Henry's reports to the Department of Lands and Survey as their guide. They soon began to feel great admiration for the man and his trailblazing work and subsequently spent twelve years researching and writing a biography, Richard Henry of Resolution Island (1987, 2015). The Hills felt it was important that Henry's many letters about his life in Dusky as New Zealand's first wildlife ranger and his other written material should be collated and published to put his pioneering conservation work on public record. Susanne began initial work on a second book in 1988, however for various reasons it was put away and only after a long hiatus and Susanne's death in 2014, did John and his daughter Victoria Jaenecke decide to continue working on Letters of a Naturalist and bring the presentation of this exceptional man's written legacy to fruition.