It's a race to the finish as David Hill maps another chapter in his remarkable life

DAVID Hill's personal story is as riveting as his new book about the contest to chart Australia.

IF you ask Google what it knows about David Hill, it gets confused, and appears to be telling you there are at least several dozen of him.

Are we talking about Hill, the former chairman then managing director of the ABC, or Hill the NSW public service mandarin who tried to keep the trains running on time and kept an eye on the water? Or is it this Hill who ran the North Sydney Bears for a time while harbouring an adulterous love of soccer, assuming he is the same David Hill who chaired the Australian Football Association?

There is Hill the child migrant, whose stark, compelling account of life at Fairbridge Farm School uncovered decades of institutional abuse; Hill, the Australian historian and the jovial interlocutor who crops up on Ian "Macca" McNamara's radio show, Australia All Over.

A discernable thread runs through Hill's career, which began, quite literally, with nuts and bolts, as an assistant at a hardware store on Sydney's north shore. Boredom motivated him to matriculate and study economics at the University of Sydney, which led to a junior teaching position. Young Macca was one of his students.

He returned to academe three decades later, gaining a diploma in classical archeology from Sydney University. Trying out his skills by conducting a heritage survey of Fairbridge led to his first book. The Forgotten Children is, in a sense, a study in human archeology, as Hill delicately scrapes back the tough outer crust to uncover decades of buried memories from former inmates (there is no other word) who have buried their brutal, loveless childhoods deep inside.

Hill has recently returned from Greece, where he is project manager for an archeological study of the ancient city of Troizen, across the Argo-Saronic Gulf from Athens, where 17 archeologists from four countries are trying to create a new map of the old city.

"Of course, I don't dig," Hill says, which surprises, since one lazily assumes digging is what archeologists do for a dollar. Not these days, thanks to GPS, sonar and electronic imaging. "The technology has turned archeology on its head," Hill says. "There is a 3rd century BC Hellenistic tower on the site, and we were able to get a detailed image of the whole thing by lunchtime."

This is the same David Hill, incidentally, who worked briefly at The Australian in the early 1970s, which may account for the effortless literary style that makes his three books on early Australian history accessible reads.

"Accessible" is Hill's choice of words: "I hate to use the term 'popular history'. There are a lot of great historians in Australia but I don't think there are enough people telling the story in an accessible way."

Hill was in Greece last month when John Howard delivered his robust defence of the Australian historical narrative. Told about the speech, Hill instinctively agrees the national story should be repeated as often as possible. "Certainly, it's the most fanstastic story," he said. "Mark Twain said it was the most remarkable story he'd ever come across."

Hill has thrown himself into archeology and historical authorship in much the same way as he threw himself into the ABC. Tim Bowden, who then presented the program BackChat, proclaimed it as the arrival of someone capable of "cutting through the bullshit of a large bureaucracy". Hill set out to methodically survey the new territory and, after studying an audit that had been breezily overlooked by others, he realised the place was crumbling. Managing director Geoffrey Whitehead was gone within months.

Hill brings a similar methodology to history; he first conducts a thorough survey, then locks in an element of detail and asks the obvious question. Naturally we know that Australia was settled in 1788, the title of Hill's first historical work. So why was it not until 1812 that Flinders completed the first map of the continent?

It tells us that when the British settled at Port Jackson, what lay beyond the Blue Mountains was a total mystery.

"That was the single most amazing thing for me about this story," Hill says.

"When the British send Arthur Phillip and a fleet of 11 ships and 1500 people to set up the first British settlement, the British didn't even know whether the east coast of Australia, New South Wales, and the west coast, New Holland, were separated by a sea or were part of the same land mass; and it was another 14 years before Matthew Flinders was sent to find out."

Hill's latest book, The Great Race, is the story of the mapping of a continent. He insists on giving credit to the Portuguese, Dutch and French, who all played a part in the exercise, as a very human story unfolds of endeavour, sheer bloody-mindedness and a blindness to all possible obstacles. One suspects Hill would have fitted in nicely.

He would like us to believe that the latest fascinating turn in his eclectic career was just a fortunate accident - "I just feel blessed that at my age a whole new career drops in my lap," he tells me - but it surely cannot be true, since those things do not simply fall from the sky.

Like his appointment as chairman at the ABC while he was still running NSW State Rail, the swift departure of Whitehead, and Hill's appointment as his replacement, it is clear that it is Hill's inner mongrel, not Lady Luck, who brings good fortune his way.