Beloved music educator and conductor Richard Gill has been awarded the Arts Leadership Award in this year’s Creative Partnerships Awards, announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last night. The award comes barely two weeks after Gill was awarded the Musicians and Opera Singers Trust (MOST) Achievement Award at the 2018 ABC Young Performers Awards Finals concert.

Also honoured were Adrian Fini for the Business Leadership Award, Mark Rubbo and Beau Neilson who jointly won the Emerging Philanthropist Award and Tim and Gina Fairfax, who won the award for Philanthropy Leadership.

Richard GillRichard Gill. Photo © Sam Grimmer

Gill was unable to make the ceremony in person as he is currently undergoing treatment for colorectal and peritoneal cancer, which has forced him to cancel several recent engagements, but the self-described “bulldozer” is still as fiery as ever talking to Limelight.

“I think it’s the age of awards – and it’s very Lewis Carroll, everyone shall have a prize, like the Caucus-Race,” Gill says. “However, every other aspect of life has awards, I guess why shouldn’t the arts? The thing is that arts awards tend to be on performance basis, like...