New Zealand PM pays tribute to Everest hero Hillary

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark today has paid personal condolences to the widow of Mount Everest conqueror Edmund Hillary, who died this week.

Clark met June Hillary at the couple’s home in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and afterwards said a state funeral for the revered mountaineer would probably take place on January 22.

This would allow time for Hillary's mountaineer and adventurer son Peter to return home from overseas, and for the body to lie in state for a period at Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral.

“Lady Hillary really wanted to do the right thing by the Hillary family and by the New Zealand public who admired Sir Edmund so much,” Ms Clark said.

“I have great admiration with how she is dealing with this,” she said.

A book of condolences has been placed at Parliament in Wellington and another book would be opened at Auckland Town Hall on Monday, Ms Clark said.

Hillary, the first person to stand atop the world’s highest mountain, was remembered as a deeply driven but unassuming man who strived to help Nepal’s people in the decades after his ascent of Mount Everest.

He died this week of a heart attack, aged 88.

Hillary's life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement – but he was especially proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the 29,035ft summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He wrote of the pair’s final steps to the top of the world: “Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

“Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation – these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed,” he noted.

Hillary consistently refused to say whether it was he or Tenzing who was the first to step atop Everest, saying the two had climbed as a team to the top.

Not until after Tenzing’s death in 1986 did he finally break his long public silence about who was first.

“We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved on to a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in every direction,” Hillary wrote in his 1999 book View from the Summit.

“Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realised we had reached the top of the world.”

Like many mountaineers, Hillary had no special insight into the question: Why climb?

“I can’t give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority still go just to climb them,” he said.