Edmund Hillary

Edmund Hillary's life divides into two chapters of almost equal significance: the mountaineer who stood where no one had stood before, and the philanthropist who spent half a century repaying that achievement by serving the people whose homeland made it possible. Few explorers have matched Hillary's physical accomplishments; fewer still have matched his moral trajectory afterward.

Born in 1919 in Auckland to a beekeeper father, Hillary was a frail, shy child who grew to six feet two inches and discovered both physical toughness and mountain passion during a school trip to Mount Ruapehu at age sixteen. The family beekeeping business, with its demands of carrying heavy hive boxes, built the cardiovascular fitness that would serve him at extreme altitude. He studied mathematics and science at Auckland University College for two years before dropping out to work the hives full-time.

During World War II, Hillary served as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, suffering burns in an accident in the Solomon Islands. After the war, he divided his year between beekeeping in summer and climbing in winter, ascending New Zealand's highest peak, Aoraki/Mount Cook, in 1948. Selection for the 1951 British Everest reconnaissance and the 1952 Cho Oyu attempt established his credentials for the main event.

The 1953 British Everest Expedition was a national enterprise: over 400 people including 362 porters, commanded by Colonel John Hunt with the explicit goal of placing the British flag on the world's highest point before French or Swiss rivals. After the first assault pair, Evans and Bourdillon, turned back within 300 feet of the summit due to oxygen equipment failure, Hunt directed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay upward. On May 29, 1953, at 11:30 am, they stood on the 29,028-foot summit. Hillary photographed Tenzing but declined to be photographed himself. Descending, he told George Lowe: 'Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.'

The news reached London on Queen Elizabeth II's coronation day and was treated as a coronation gift to the new monarch. Hillary was knighted immediately. Yet fame never consumed him. In 1958, as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he led the New Zealand section that reached the South Pole overland by tractor, the first to do so since Scott in 1912. In 1985, alongside Neil Armstrong, he flew to the North Pole, completing the Three Poles Challenge before it was formally named.

From 1960 until his death, Hillary's primary work was the Himalayan Trust, building schools, hospitals, bridges, and water systems in Nepal's Sherpa communities. This was not celebrity charity but sustained, hands-on development work lasting nearly five decades. The 1975 death of his wife Louise and daughter Belinda in a plane crash near Kathmandu while traveling to join him at a hospital-building site did not deter him; he continued the work they had shared.

Hillary died on January 11, 2008, aged 88. New Zealand gave him a state funeral. His portrait appears on the nation's five-dollar note, making him the only non-head of state depicted on a New Zealand banknote during their lifetime. He insisted the backdrop show Aoraki/Mount Cook rather than Everest, choosing his homeland's peak over the one that made him famous.