FED: Village school beats a footprint on a mountaintop: Hillary

AAP General News (Australia)
08-16-1999
FED: Village school beats a footprint on a mountaintop: Hillary

By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

SYDNEY, Aug 16 AAP - Sir Edmund Hillary may be 80 but he will continue to walk the mountain
trails of Nepal "as long as I can put one foot in front of the other".

The first conqueror of Mt Everest still devotes much of his energies to raising funds for
the Nepalese people, when he could be "lolling about on some sun-drenched beach somewhere".

"It's certainly not because of some altruistic passion," he said today.

"I'm not really one of those do-gooders.

"I think it's more of a feeling of friendship and a sense of responsibility.

"It all started with the building of a simple mountain school, which seemed to give me more
satisfaction than a footprint on a mountaintop.

"That sense of purpose remains."

The New Zealander, who has helped build schools, hospitals and airfields in Nepal, told a
Sydney literary luncheon it was teamwork that got him and sherpa Tenzing Norgay to the summit
of Everest in 1953.

He recalled how Tenzing saved his life after he fell down a crevasse while they were
training for their epic climb, but he had not really expressed appreciation.

"I'd certainly have been very annoyed if he hadn't," Sir Edmund said.

"But we were a team. I expected him to carry out exactly the right procedures in an
emergency as I would have expected myself if the roles had been reversed.

"It was teamwork that got us to the top."

Sir Edmund did not touch on who reached the summit first, a question he does not regard as
important but which he is continually asked about.

However, his book View From The Summit makes it clear.

"I continued cutting a line of steps upwards," he writes.

"Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in
every direction. Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense
satisfaction we realised we had reached the top of the world."

There was a lesson on fame today from a man who has never regarded himself as a hero or a
natural athlete, and who looked back on himself as "big, brawny, a little on the dumb side,
but very determined and strongly motivated".

He recalled getting into a Melbourne taxi "in the days when I was reasonably famous" and
the driver asking him gruffly: "Your name's Hillary isn't it? You climbed some sort of
mountain didn't you?"

The driver then asked if he had ever seen Australian football, telling him what a tough
game it was.

"No," replied Hillary, "but I did have lunch yesterday with Ron Barassi."

The driver screeched to a halt, and fumbled for a slip of paper. "Can I have your
autograph?" he asked. "Gee, lunch with Ron Barassi!"

AAP dc/kbw

KEYWORD: HILLARY NIGHTLEAD (WITH PIC)

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