Edmund Hillary summits Everest

Edmund Percival Hillary was born in Auckland on 20 July 1919 and grew up at Tūākau in rural South Auckland. His father, Percy, founded and edited the Tuakau District News and took up beekeeping on land allotted to him after service in the First World War. A school ski trip to Mt Ruapehu in 1935 gave Hillary his first experience of mountains. In 1938 he joined his father and brother as a full-time beekeeper, and the heavy work made him fit. His first ascent was a modest scramble up Mt Ollivier, above Mount Cook village. In 1946 he met the guide Harry Ayres, and over the next three summers the pair climbed several peaks, including New Zealand's three highest: Aoraki/Mt Cook, Mt Tasman and Mt Dampier. In 1948 Hillary and Ayres, with Mick Sullivan and Ruth Adams, climbed the South Ridge of Aoraki/Mt Cook, its last major unclimbed ridge.

In 1950 the climber Earle Riddiford invited Hillary to tackle some of the world's highest peaks, and also recruited George Lowe and Ed Cotter. In June 1951 the four trekked into the Garhwal Himalaya of India on the first all-New Zealand Himalayan expedition, and climbed five 6,000-metre peaks. While they were still in India, the New Zealand Alpine Club asked that two New Zealanders join Eric Shipton's 1951 Everest reconnaissance, and Riddiford and Hillary claimed the places. Among that expedition's Sherpas was Tenzing Norgay. Himalayan governments usually allowed only one Everest expedition a year, and before 1952 the British had enjoyed a virtual monopoly. In 1952 a Swiss expedition held the permit and reached 8,600 metres. The British made a reconnaissance of Cho Oyu instead, again inviting Riddiford and Hillary, this time with Lowe.

For the 1953 British Everest expedition Shipton was replaced as leader by Colonel John Hunt, and Hillary and Lowe were invited to join. Lowe pioneered a route up the steep Lhotse face to the South Col. From there Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon reached the South Summit but got no further. Hillary carried about 27 kilograms to the final camp, and on 29 May 1953 he and Tenzing set off from it. Beyond the point Evans and Bourdillon had reached they met an unexpectedly steep barrier, later named the Hillary Step, which Hillary climbed by wedging himself between snow and rock and wriggling up. The two men became the first people to stand on the 8,848-metre summit, the culmination, in Te Ara's words, of 12 serious attempts since 1921, including nine British expeditions. On their safe return Hillary said to Lowe, 'Well George, we knocked the bastard off!', a comment his Te Ara biographer, Shaun Barnett, describes as infamous and later regretted.

News of the climb reached London in time to be released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, on 2 June. Before the expedition had come out of the mountains the Queen made Hillary a knight, as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In Britain he and Tenzing became the subject of a media frenzy, attending formal events and lecturing to packed halls. The two men presented the climb as the work of the whole expedition, but there was intense speculation about which of them had set foot on the summit first. Tenzing ended it in his 1955 autobiography, Man of Everest, by revealing that Hillary was first. Back in Auckland, Hillary married Louise Rose on 3 September 1953. Te Ara's biography says that in New Zealand, Hillary and Everest helped turn mountaineering from a somewhat fringe activity into something that had new-found respect.

Hillary led the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and on 4 January 1958 his group became the first to reach the South Pole overland since Robert Falcon Scott's expedition. In 1960 Sherpas in the Khumbu region of Nepal told him they badly wanted a school. He raised the money himself, setting up what became the Himalayan Trust, and after the Silver Hut expedition of 1961 he supervised the building of Khumjung School. Over the following decades the trust built schools, airfields, bridges, hospitals and clinics in Nepal, and the Sherpas called Hillary Burra Sahib ('big in heart'). He became a member of the Order of New Zealand in 1987 and a Knight of the Garter in 1995, and in 1990 he was the only living person chosen to appear on New Zealand's new banknotes, on the $5 note. Hillary died in Auckland on 11 January 2008, aged 88, and was farewelled at a state funeral, a rare honour for a private citizen, on 22 January.