Sir Edmund Hillary considered himself an ordinary New Zealander. So why is his
face on our five-dollar note? His conquering of Mount Everest brought him instant
fame, but he was much more than a mountaineer.
On 29 May 1953, the thirty-three-year-old beekeeper from Auckland crawled out of
his tent perched on a rocky ledge high on Mount Everest. A ferocious wind had
whipped the tent all night. Hillary said it sounded like rifle fire. His Nepali climbing
companion, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, said it sounded like the roar of a thousand tigers.
With temperatures at minus 27 degrees Celsius, the men set off on the final leg of
their amazing climb. For five hours, they tackled rock and ice faces, some of them
vertical, until, at 11.30 a.m., there was nowhere else to climb. They were standing on
the top of the world.
Over the next fifty years, Sir Edmund was to have many more adventures and
important roles. He led expeditions to the South Pole, travelling on tractors over
crevasse-covered glaciers and deep drifts of snow. He jetboated from the mouth of the
mighty Ganges River, with its fearsome rapids, to its source in the Himalayas. He was
New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India. But of all the adventures he had, the one
that dominated his life was working among the Sherpas, high in the Himalayan
mountains.
One day, while sitting in a group around a smoky fire in Nepal, Sir Edmund asked a
Sherpa, “What will happen to you in the future?” The Sherpa thought for a moment
then said, “Our children have eyes, but they cannot see. What we need more than
anything is a school in Khumjung Village.”
From that comment, Hillary’s idea of the Himalayan Trust was born. Donations of
money and materials, along with volunteer help, soon poured in from around the
world. Work began in 1961 on the first Sherpa school.
There are no roads where the Sherpas live, and it’s a seventeen-day trek from
Kathmandu. Pre-assembled aluminium buildings were carried on the backs of porters
to the remote village. At the school’s opening, forty pupils were enrolled. This was
the first of many projects and a new way of life for Sir Edmund Hillary.