Publicity:
It’s a stunning setting for any family get together. Up high in the Himalayas, the sky cloudless, the air crisp and bracing – if a little thin – and a big celebration is finally coming together. Only this family isn’t any old family and it’s not exactly shaping as a seamless, comfortable get together.
In fact it’s probably going to be pretty prickly for some.
Sir Edmund Hillary’s son Peter is here along with an ebullient band of his old mountaineering cohorts like Everest team member George Band, protégé Mike Gill and fellow climber John McKinnon.
And Sir Edmund’s widow Lady June Hillary is here as well with some of her friends and family.
And so the 50th anniversary of the Khumjung school – the very first of what became an extensive series of education, community and health projects established by Sir Edmund’s Himalayan Trust – is underway with both camps keeping a dignified distance.
Reporter Eric Campbell is there as well and very soon he’s asking some obvious questions. First to the son:
CAMPBELL: “Do you and June talk anymore?”
PETER HILLARY: “No, I mean look, I’ve tried but she doesn’t want to talk.”
And then to the son’s stepmother:
CAMPBELL: ”It’s fairly obvious today there is something of a rift between you and Peter Hillary.”
LADY JUNE HILLARY: ”I don’t want to discuss that. No. Peter Hillary has created a rift between him and me.”
The family rift may be inconsequential - nobody’s business - but for the fact that Lady June is the custodian of Sir Edmund’s legacy here. She now heads the New Zealand based charity he formed and - convinced she has her late husband’s imprimatur - she’s doing things her way.
And as Lady June’s influence over the charity has grown, that of Peter Hillary and many of Sir Edmund’s closest climbing colleagues has faded. Peter Hillary is now with The Australian Himalayan Foundation and there’s a deep difference of opinion between the two groups about the biggest and most pressing priorities for assistance and developmental aid.
Featuring some of the most spectacular scenery captured by Foreign Correspondent cameras The Shadow of Everest is an enthralling and revealing exploration of one man’s emphatic and indelible stamp on history and how the future may write the epilogue.
Further Information
The Australian Himalayan Foundation - Supporting the People of the Himalaya
Himalayan Trust
Peter Hillary website.
chopper landing
music
00:00
Gathering
George band meets Peter Hillary
CAMPBELL: It is a gathering of mountaineering legends. In the village of Khumjung, high in the Himalaya, family and friends have come to honour the legacy of Edmund Hillary.
There’s George Band, one of the last surviving members of the 1953 expedition that conquered Everest.
00:24
George Band walking
laughs
“What’s it like coming back here?”
GEORGE BAND: “Very, very special.”
00:50
PETER HILLARY: “I mean this guy is truly amazing. He was the youngest on the 1953 expedition and one of the strongest”.
00:56
Peter closest to camera
Lady Hillary
CAMPBELL: This is Peter Hillary, Edmund Hillary’s son and a world-class mountaineer and explorer in his own right. He’s climbed Everest twice.
Also arriving by helicopter is Sir Edmund’s second wife and widow, Lady June Hillary. She now heads the New Zealand-based charity he founded, the Himalayan Trust.
01:00
01:13
“Does it feel like you’re coming home almost?”
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “Yes it does exactly feel like coming home. It looks so good. Everything’s looking good”.
01:27
CAMPBELL: They’ve come here for the 50th anniversary of what many regard as Hillary’s greatest achievement, not mountaineering but a program of building schools and hospitals for the local Sherpa people.
01:34
children singing
CAMPBELL: This is the first school the Himalayan Trust built in 1961. It was the start of a campaign that transformed this once impoverished region. But beneath the bonhomie there’s tension. Lady Hillary and her stepson Peter no longer speak.
01:50
01:57
Lady Hillary
CAMPBELL: “It’s fairly obvious today there is something of a rift between you and Peter Hillary”.
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “I don’t want to discuss that. No. Peter Hillary has created a rift between him and me”.
02:17
Mike Gill (right) & John McKinnon
CAMPBELL: And some of Edmund Hillary’s oldest friends like his climbing protégé Mike Gill, accuse June of forcing them out of the charity they helped build.
02:34
Dr Mike Gill (left)
DR MIKE GILL: “June is a person who likes to have just a small group around her and she prefers her family to be around her”.
02:45
CAMPBELL: “So neither of you are on the board anymore are you?”
02:51
DR MIKE GILL: “I was. I was on the council but I was actually expelled from the council and I have the distinction of being the only person to have been expelled”.
02:53
stream
CAMPBELL: It’s not just an issue of family in-fighting. It goes to the heart of how Sir Edmund’s work will continue. June wants to keep it all in the Everest region, even though it’s now the richest part of Nepal.
03:08
(follow on)
Super:
Lady Hillary
Himalayan Trust
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “We only have the money to do that so that’s our
philosophy that we keep it and do it properly and I think it’s working too”.
03:24
03:27
Sherpas by stream
CAMPBELL: Peter wants to take it to the valleys beyond the Sherpas where people are still as poor as when his father first came here. These areas supply the low-paid and mostly uneducated porters who labour for the wealthy Sherpa-owned businesses. They spend several months each year carrying back breaking loads up and down the tourist trail.
03:33
trekking
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “They’re almost living in the 13th century. I mean they don’t have money. They’re subsistence farmers.
A lot of the challenges that people had back in Europe centuries ago are their challenges”.
04:09
04:16
newspaper
Colour stills of summit
CAMPBELL: The world heard of Hillary’s triumph on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. It marked him indelibly as a hero of the Empire.
04:26
Still Hillary and Tenzing
CAMPBELL: He could have retired to enjoy his fame. Instead, he spent his life repaying the Sherpas. They’re descendants of Tibetans who migrated to Nepal centuries ago in search of grazing land. While they’d saved many climbers’ lives, their own lives were hard and short.
04:36
Super: Dr. Michael Gill
Mike Gill (left) & John McKinnon
walking around
DR MIKE GILL: “Ed always told a story about in 1960 he asked the Sherpa Sirdah he said, if we could do something for you what would it be? And he thought it would be health, but the Sirdah said please give us a school in Khumjung.
And six months later Ed gave them a school in Khumjung at which we are here for the 50th jubilee.
Well we came in 1963 and Ed had built his second and third schools”.
04:58
stills
CAMPBELL: Mike Gill and John McKinnon, both doctors, became part of Sir Edmund’s mission. As young climbers, they would come to this region to tackle new peaks but also help build and run the schools and hospitals.
05:22
still with Hillary
Gill, McKinnon & Eric walking
DR JOHN MCKINNON: “Well that was a pretty small price to pay I mean to have a trip to the Himalayas, climb mountains and build a bridge or build a school or something which is the type of expedition that Ed ran. It was no hardship believe me”.
05:35
archive of children running
CAMPBELL: One school followed another, giving Sherpa children a chance their parents never had.
05:51
cuts ribbon
ARCHIVE: “On behalf of the Himalayan Trust and all those that have helped build this school I have much pleasure now in declaring this school open!”
05:57
archive of Hillary
super:
Peter Hillary
Australian Himalayan Foundation
PETER HILLARY: “It was like a calling, a calling to go and help people who really enjoyed being with and who’d helped him on his expeditions and I think he just found that every time he got another proposal for a little school over on that side of the valley or a water system down there and he could see how difficult it was for the local people, he really wanted to help and that’s what he did”.
06:14
CAMPBELL: Dawa Phuti was among the first girls to attend the Khumjung school. Not everyone approved.
06:41
Dawa Phuti in garden
DAWA PHUTI: “My mother said oh stay home, work for the family, but my father, he has been to the Darjeeling here, into Kathmandu so he knows the value of education so he insists me to go to school”.
06:49
Super:
Dawa Phuti Sherpa
CAMPBELL: “And was it exciting to be one of the first girls to go?”
DAWA PHUTI: “Well no because lots of boys always teases us”.
CAMPBELL: “Oh no!” (laughs)
06:03
lodge
Today, Dawa Phuti runs a popular lodge in the Himalayan village of Lukla.
07:15
Dawa Phuti
DAWA PHUTI: “In my hotel I do all the work, serving like a waiter. I do the cleaning up and look in the kitchen and also Sherpas work hard, foreigners like us because we work hard”.
07:22
Stills
serving guests
CAMPBELL: Her life story is typical of many Sherpas. Her father summitted Everest with an Indian expedition in 1965 but died in a climbing accident six years later. School was the family’s salvation. She not only learned skills to run a successful business but ensured her children had the best education possible. One of her sons now works for a five star hotel in Sydney.
07:39
DAWA PHUTI: “If I hadn’t been educated maybe I might be a porter girl! (laughs) Who knows? Yak driver woman”.
08:08
inside lodge
photo
CAMPBELL: A photo of Sir Edmund has pride of place in her lodge. He became a kind of surrogate father.
08:20
Hillary archive
DAWA PHUTI: “When I was a little girl, he used to come sometimes twice a year and we used to sing and dance for him, but I didn’t know that he was so famous”.
08:30
Still Hillary with Dawa Phuti
CAMPBELL: “So you just thought he was an ordinary man who built the school?”
DAWA PHUTI: “Yes I just thought he was an ordinary man”.
CAMPBELL: “And what sort of man was he? What’s your recollection?”
DAWA PHUTI: “Ah he’s very huge, humble, gentle and he’s a very, very nice man”.
CAMPBELL: “Do you miss him?”
DAWA PHUTI: “Yes. (starts to cry) I miss him. Sorry”.
08:40
Mountains
people
CAMPBELL: Education wasn’t the only way he changed lives. Once the school building was underway, Sir Edmund turned his attention to the chronic illnesses in the Sherpa community. People weren’t just dying from diseases like smallpox, children were being born with mental retardation known as cretinism because of poor diet.
09:06
People
Mike Gill (left) & John McKinnon
goitre photo
patient with McKinnon
DR MIKE GILL: “One of the really interesting early things was the iodine deficiency in the area because being a high mountain area, there’s no iodine in the water
and every women had a big lumpy goitre in her throat and what you didn’t realise just passing through was the number of cretins that were being born. It was the Australians who discovered that if you inject iodised oil into an arm, it will release oil for the next five years and John worked on this a lot when he first came and we got rid of all the goitres and all the cretins”.
09:30
Super: Dr John McKinnon
DR JOHN MCKINNON: “Not a single kid has been born in this area with cretinism since that happened”.
09:59
exterior of hospital
CAMPBELL: The hospital he built at Kunde, the region’s first, is now run by a local Sherpa, Dr Kami Temba. Without the nearby Khumjung school, his life would have taken a very different turn.
10:06
super: Dr Kami Temba
DR KAMI TEMBA: “My family had quite a big yak farm so my primary occupation would be yak herder”.
10:20
CAMPBELL: Instead he walked five hours a day to attend the school. The Himalayan Trust later sent him to Fiji to complete his medical qualifications.
10:32
DR JOHN MCKINNON: “The great thing has been that people who’ve gone through Ed’s education system, have become the staff at the hospital. That, that’s really the marvellous thing, wouldn’t you agree?”
10:43
Mike Gill with John McKinnon
DR MIKE GILL: “Absolutely, absolutely”.
10:52
airstrip
CAMPBELL: In all, the project has built 27 schools, two fully equipped hospitals and a network of health clinics. Many of the Sherpa graduates are now some of Nepal’s most successful professionals and business people. And the project has changed the region forever. The airstrips Edmund Hillary built to bring in supplies now also bring trekkers and tourists.
10:55
DAWA PHUTI: “We used to run away when we see foreigners!” (laughing)
CAMPBELL: “Ah now the place is full of them”.
11:27
One foreigner who everyone recognises is Peter Hillary.
11:38
Hillary with Campbell
CAMPBELL: “My God you’ve moved fast. You were a day behind us!”
PETER HILLARY: “Well every so often I like to have a bit of a work out so I’ve come up this hill as fast as I could”.
CAMPBELL: “You don’t feel the altitude I suppose?”
PETER HILLARY: “Oh no you feel the altitude but I’m feeling good so forty seven minutes up the Namche Hill”.
11:42
CAMPBELL: Every season he leads treks here to raise money for the communities.
11:58
Houses
Hillary with Campbell
PETER HILLARY: “See I first came here when I was just eleven years old and there were simple little wooden huts, dry stone walls, smoke everywhere. There wasn’t a single corrugated iron roof. Now look at it! It really is.... Namche Bazaar - you can buy anything here”.
12:03
Cafes
woman carrying load walks through
CAMPBELL: “Internet, cappuccinos, wi-fi”.
PETER HILLARY: “Oh that’s right. You know check on your email and so on. It really has developed. You know it’s sort of a Sherpa Swiss village in a way -someone coming through with a rather large load.
CAMPBELL: “So it’s got relatively wealthy these days”.
PETER HILLARY: “It has but you only have to turn around and go south beyond Lukla air strip which was the little air strip that dad built and you go back into the old Nepal”.
12:18
Hillary archive
CAMPBELL: He and his sisters, Sarah and Belinda, spent much of their childhood working on their father’s projects with their mother Louise.
12:47
Archive
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “They’re wonderful memories and the best part of it was because we were a family - mum, dad and the kids all together – participating and being involved in it. What better thing could you do with your family than bundle them all up and come to a place like this and just go walking and visit different peoples and have this incredible adventure together, the whole family”.
12:56
archive of family
CAMPBELL: But in 1975 came a terrible tragedy.
13:18
Louise Hillary
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “We were thinking it was going to be the adventure of a life time.
We were going to build a new hospital, we were going to live here for a year, we were going to learn the language. You know we were really going to do all sorts of things that we’d wanted to do”.
13:23
Louise Hillary
Belinda
CAMPBELL: Instead Louise Hillary and her younger daughter Belinda, Peter’s baby sister, were killed in a light plane crash on their way to join Sir Edmund.
13:38
“It’s hard to imagine how devastating that must have been”.
13:48
Peter Hillary
Stills of family
PETER HILLARY: “You know I think even sitting here now as a 56 year old man in a way I still struggle to come to terms with that. Experiences like that are so shattering that I think you just have to learn to live with it. I don’t think it’s really a case of ever really shedding the pain”.
13:52
Still Sir Edmund Hillary
Peter Hillary
CAMPBELL: “Did your father ever shed the pain?”
PETER HILLARY: “You know it’s hard to say but I actually don’t know if he ever did”.
14:09
Hillary archive
CAMPBELL: But he continued the work, later describing it as more satisfying than climbing Everest. The public never saw the turmoil he went through.
14:18
Peter Hillary
Hillary archive
PETER HILLARY: “He wondered a lot about why he was so driven to do it and then I think he suddenly realised that if he didn’t carry on and complete Paphlu Hospital and some of the other projects, in some ways it was just going to make it worse. On one hand it gave him the focus to see that through and may be sort of divert some of the pain that he was feeling but also sort of to make sense and to make good of what had happened”.
14:31
Still of Edmund Hillary & June Mulgrew
marriage photo
Hillary archive (with June)
CAMPBELL: After many years of solitude, Sir Edmund found solace in June Mulgrew, the widow of a friend and fellow climber. They married in 1989 and she became a partner in his work, joining him on the few high altitude visits he could make as he struggled with declining health.
14:59
Lady June Hillary
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “At Paphlu Hospital I remember painting the whole kitchen inside the cupboards and it was awful, the paint was awful and the brushes were hard to work with and it seemed to be never ending. We’ve really been hands on”.
15:20
ceremony
CAMPBELL: But as June’s influence grew, Peter Hillary’s diminished - much to the dismay of many long-time trust workers like Jim Strang.
15:34
Jim Strang
JIM STRANG: “I’m really disappointed that Peter is not acknowledged you know within the New Zealand Himalayan Trust”.
CAMPBELL: “What’s behind all that?”
JIM STRANG: “Oh well I think it’s family dynamics, yeah.... which is disappointing. I don’t think it needs to be that way”.
15:44
Strang with children
CAMPBELL: Jim Strang has run a successful teacher training programme here since 1997. It shows teachers, many of whom only have high school diplomas, how to bring lessons to life, rather than relying on rote learning.
16:03
Super:
Jim Strang
Australian Himalayan Foundation
JIM STRANG: “It’s an ongoing need and I believe without that, we’re actually short changing the teachers.
To just build the schools and then not resource them with training or with other things is false”.
16:21
CAMPBELL: But in 2004 the Trust, now dominated by June, suddenly stopped funding it.
16:38
Lady June Hillary
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “We did it for I think it was six years.... or four years. I can’t remember now and they felt that that was good enough. It was the same as the forestry. We did that for a certain time. I think that’s the way to do aid really”.
16:46
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “I just thought this is incredible. We’ve got this remarkable person, a team of teachers, a great need”.
17:02
CAMPBELL: By now Peter was working with a new organisation, the Australian Himalayan Foundation. It took over the training program, which is now seen as a model for the Nepali education system. Lowly paid teachers are given concentrated training by experienced Australian, New Zealand and Nepali teachers on how to get the best out of their students.
17:13
Namdu with class
TEACHER: This is hot water or cold water?
That’s your hot water now. When you had hot water did your balloon blow? Yes or no?
CHILDREN WITH TEACHER: Yes
It’s the first teacher training Namdu has ever had.
17:47
(follow on)
NAMDU: “The training has been really, really effective on me. It’s helping me a lot”.
CAMPBELL: “So you think you’ll be a better teacher now?”
NAMDU: “Yeah I think I’ll be a more… better teacher”.
17:51
Jim Strang
JIM STRANG: “The Australian Himalayan Foundation picked up the whole mantle and extended it. That’s the big thing. Now we’ve gone from 70 schools here to almost 300 schools”.
18:03
Peter Hillary
CAMPBELL: Working outside his father’s charity, Peter Hillary has continued to carry on his work, raising funds for projects, monitoring their success and visiting old family friends like his surrogate Sherpa Aunt, Ang Dooli. (Greets Ang Dooli)
He’s been staying in her house since 1966.
18:14
Super:
Peter Hillary
Australian Himalayan Foundation
PETER HILLARY: “I love coming up here. I love catching up with a lot of the local people and I like seeing the results.
You know to see some of the schools that we’ve just recently visited, the improvement in the teaching standards, those sort of things, it’s been very gratifying”.
18:44
18:57
Peter Hillary trekking
CAMPBELL: Until recently the rift with his step-mother was a closely guarded secret, but late last year he discovered June was planning to auction his father’s old watches which Peter says had been left to him and his sister.
19:02
PETER HILLARY: “I was absolutely astounded. You know I felt that there were some things that were very special. Ed Hillary, I mean okay he’s my father but he was a pretty special man. He did a lot of very special things. You know it wasn’t just a family issue, it wasn’t just for like Sarah and I to say well these things belong to us and we’ll do with them as we wish. It’s not like that”.
19:17
CAMPBELL: They won a High Court injunction to stop the sale. June Hillary remains furious at what happened but reluctant to speak publicly.
19:42
Lady June Hillary
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “But that’s nothing to do with the Himalayan Trust. Absolutely nothing to do with it - except that I wanted to sell them to give the money to the Himalayan Trust and he didn’t like that. Ed gave them to me to do that and I haven’t been allowed to do it”.
Peter Hillary
CAMPBELL: “Do you and June talk anymore?”
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “No. I mean look I’ve tried but she doesn’t want to talk”.
CAMPBELL: “But you’re about to come face to face at this commemoration”.
PETER HILLARY: “Yes but there won’t be any conversation I’m sure, you know? I don’t know”.
50th Anniversary ceremony
CAMPBELL: And so it was at the 50th Anniversary. Both were welcomed with affection by the Sherpa people but neither even made eye contact as they sat just inches apart. Despite the obvious tension, all insist it doesn’t affect the mission to carry on with Sir Edmund’s work.
20:24
Lady June Hillary
LADY JUNE HILLARY: “It’s three years now, three and a half years since Ed died and it’s going very well. I’m really thrilled at how well it’s going”.
20:43
Mike Gill with John McKinnon
DR JOHN MCKINNON: “The reality is that the work does go on, despite sort of conflicts that happen”.
20:51
plane
CAMPBELL: And Peter Hillary is determined to extend the work beyond the relatively well off Sherpa region. You don’t have to go far to see the difference in how people live.
20:56
view from plane
poor village
We flew past the majestic peaks of Everest and Ama Dablam then turned south to the town of Paphlu. This is where many treks begin, but just across the valley from here is the village of Luhra where trekkers never come. The poverty is wrenching.
21:15
Sarki Sherpa
Sarki Sherpa is illiterate and lives in this one bedroom house with her son Lakpa, the last of five children. Edmund Hillary gave some help here, but the area’s far from transformed.
21:37
inside house
SARKI SHERPA: “Yes, I have heard about him. We have heard that Sir has helped a lot in many places and I have heard that after the Sirs came things improved in many places”.
21:52
INTERPRETER: “Did you get any help?”
SARKI SHERPA: “Not so far… not so far”.
22:06
school
CAMPBELL: Twenty-three years ago the New Zealand Himalayan Trust built some classrooms. Today the Australian Himalayan Foundation trains the teachers. Parents like Sarki believe that’s what’s making a difference.
22:14
classroom
Sarki
SARKI SHERPA: “The school is better now than it used to be.
The teachers come more regularly now and that makes us happy”.
22:33
Children
Peter Hillary
PETER HILLARY: “This is a country now 28 million people living in a tiny mountains parcel of land. You know the average income is two hundred dollars a year or really whatever it is, it’s an extremely poor country and there’s a lot to do”.
22:49
CAMPBELL: The hope of Sir Edmund’s supporters is that the true spirit of his vision continues - the remarkable selfless contribution to a people who became his extended family.
23:17
Mike Gill with John McKinnon
DR JOHN MCKINNON: “The opportunity to go trekking in the hills with Ed and to build a school and to actually see the way in which that type of minimal aid really, I mean not much money type aid can actually transform lives and so we’ve built up huge friendships not only between people like ourselves, but also with the local people and so to go to a function like we’ve been for the last few days and to have you know people come up crying, oh God it makes me cry!” (Mike agrees)
23:38
Still of Sir Edmund Hillary against Everest in background
Dawa Phuti
mountains
DAWA PHUTI: “I just think he has got good heart.
Fifty years ago there were no schools, no education, no health, so no water supplies so when he saw this I think his said oh well this is the thing that I should do. So he did it”.
24:19
Music out
24:51
Credits:
Reporter: Eric Campbell
Camera: David Martin
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Producer: Marianne Leitch
Additional archive footage courtesy Michael Gill and Peter Hillary