Gregory Hill

GREGORY HILL was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He studied music at the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington and pursued a successful career as a French horn player and teacher in orchestras and universities in New Zealand and Australia.

An upbringing in isolated 1960s New Zealand ensured a lively curiosity about the rest of the world which was later only occasionally satisfied by career-related travels.

He secretly nurtured a background enthusiasm for long-distance train travel, impossible to realise in a country with only the most basic passenger railway system. Opportunities aligned and briefly flowered in the halcyon year and a half between career end and Covid beginning.

Gregory lives in Wellington, New Zealand with his violinist wife Anne. He has two adult sons and two grandsons, and follows his passions for music, cooking and the outdoors and, most recently, writing about train travel.