by Michael Gill
‘I have been given more than my share of excitement, beauty, laughter and friendship.’ Now, unhappily, Sir Edmund has been given more than his share of grief.12
In September Nothing Venture, Nothing Win won New Zealand’s Wattie Book Award for the best book published in New Zealand during 1975. Sarah accepted the prize on behalf of her father. In the UK it reached third place on the non-fiction bestseller list.
Ed had gone back to Nepal in mid-August. He arranged for friends such as Jim Wilson and Murray Jones to visit Phaplu during the rest of the year and to help Rex who was building the new hospital. Max Pearl came over again, and Ed wrote:
Dear Max, I have left 165 Mogadon capsules which will keep me going for 55 nights and 274 of the Serepax 30mg tablets which I find I need quite a lot of so they will only last about 50 days … I certainly have many periods of jollity with the gang but I also have some pretty grim nights when I tend to relive the whole ghastly accident. It will be good to see Sarah again but I find it difficult to imagine returning to Auckland or even New Zealand again … I have come to accept that once the hospital and airfield are finished I can see little virtue in living … but, who knows, I may still find some purpose that will keep me going. Kindest regards, Ed13
Before leaving Auckland, Ed and I had agreed to shoot a half-hour documentary film for New Zealand’s TV2 channel. There were no funds for a professional crew to go to Nepal, but TV2 agreed to lend me an Arriflex camera, and Sarah was given brief training as a sound recordist. Ed liked making films. He needed the focus of a project, he enjoyed thinking up storylines, he thought about what he wanted to say, he liked having an audience.
At the site of the hospital, which included an outpatients’ block, short-and long-stay wards, and staff quarters, Ed was putting in a full day’s work. The local rum that we drank at evening meals allowed Ed to relax into something more like his old gregarious self, laughing and full of talk. But the insomniac nights were hard. After a few days in Phaplu, we trekked up the wild gorge of the Lumding Khola and in bad weather slept under a huge overhanging rock above the tree line. Murray Jones played his tape of Dark Side of the Moon. We continued to Khunde where Ed talked on camera about the past and about Louise and Belinda. There was among us a deep affection for Ed and a need to help him live through what we knew had been a grotesque act of violence against his innermost being.
Peter was not there but was writing letters.
Dear Dad,
Hope all is well. Just wondering what your future plans are. I was wondering if we could organize some sort of trip – camping, Great Barrier, etc, on your return – just the three of us or maybe a bigger crowd …
… I just want to remind you that you are not alone in your feelings and depressions. The loss of Mum and Belinda is still unreal; I find the loss of the one person I used to talk with freely a terrible blow. Especially when that person is your mother and you only have one mother; I feel depleted when I think I must live on without her lively and enthusiastic nature, so filled with love and affection. I miss Lindy too, terribly. Her maturity and her astounding vitality and enthusiasm so like Mum’s in many ways.
The loss of people in whom you used to confide, plus a time of confusion and depression, is a time to reach out to others – to Phyl and Jim, and David Dove to mention a few and let them hear your moans and upsets. It’s often hard to know the difference between genuine sorrow and being sorry for oneself. I think one needs friends for this. I have never been so open with my thoughts and feelings as I have recently with these people and I have been amazed and relieved to find their willingness to listen, to help and advise. There must be something in the old line, ‘Seek and ye shall find’.
Write soon,
My best wishes and love, Peter.14
Postscript
Forty years later, an unexpected letter to Peter Hillary filled in some back history:
Dear Mr. Hillary
… Peter Shand’s father bought him a small plane when he was still a teenager. He told me he taught himself to fly but had a few lessons at a flight school in order to obtain his pilot’s license. He clocked up a considerable number of hours flying this plane.
In about 1969 Peter came to Africa. He met with three pilots where I was living and heard about a job. He was a very outgoing person but very disorganized. He wasn’t able to get the job as a pilot as he didn’t have the correct license so he had to sort this out which he said would need flying lessons and take about 6 months and a lot of money.
Within a month he was back with a license – he had changed his log book to show he had night flying experience and other requirements.
I flew extensively to remote airstrips with Peter and ex-Air Force pilots and the difference was profound. Other pilots carried a proper case for documents and wore a uniform – white shirt / tie / cap – Peter was disheveled, a typical bush pilot. However that was not my main concern. All other pilots took care before takeoff, checking everything. I asked Peter many times why he never did this and he said ‘they still think they’re in the Air Force’. Peter was always in a hurry.
Two events led to Peter being told that his contract would not be renewed. He had a side business buying goats in remote places and flying them back on return journeys. This later led to his plane failing an inspection – the urine from the goats had damaged the rear control cables.
A more serious matter and one I had warned him about was that at remote air strips he would leave the engine running while loading passengers and freight. The inevitable happened when someone walked into the propeller killing him instantly.
When he was put on suspension he looked for another job and was accepted by Royal Nepal Airways. The moment I heard on the BBC that a plane carrying Edmund Hillary’s wife had crashed in Nepal I knew it was Peter. Years later I learnt he had not done his pre-flight checks.
Mr Hillary, I was in a position to have stopped Peter flying on a commercial basis. This has been on my mind for over 40 years.
Please accept my apology. I was very young at that time.15
– CHAPTER 28 –
Killing time making films
The aching emptiness left by the death of Louise was filled, in part at least, by family and friends. Ed knew he was important to Peter and Sarah, and they to him, and they wrote to each other when they were apart. Ed was like a son to Louise’s parents, Phyl and Jim Rose, and they were always there in the house next door when he returned from Chicago or Nepal to Auckland. His own parents had died a decade earlier, Gertrude at age 72 in March 1965, and Percy only four months later at age 80. They were a close-knit couple. It was as if Percy had simply lost the will to live.
In the years that followed the crash Ed seldom shared his grief with his friends, but he enjoyed their company when he went on trips. Making films added a new dimension. ‘I get more pleasure out of these filming jaunts than anything else I do at present,’1 Ed wrote. After 1975 this was not saying much, but filming seemed to be a lifeline, albeit frayed and likely to part under stress.
Television had come to New Zealand in 1960 and for more than a decade neither viewers nor the two TV stations were demanding as to the technical quality of the film they used. They – and even the BBC – had welcomed Ed’s offer to shoot amateur footage of his schools, airstrips and hospitals. He had a primitive wind-up Bell and Howell movie camera which could be hung around the neck while climbing. Prior to setting out on an expedition, he would receive from NZTV 100-foot rolls of film on which to record events from time to time. On his return, the film would be edited, narrated and shown as a half-hour documentary. I was a willing photographer, so assumed the jobs of cameraman, director and script writer. I had one hour of tuition on film-making in 1963 from a BBC producer in London who was buying, in advance, a copy of our footage for a weekly programme showing expeditions in distant parts of the world. His instructions were simple: ‘You are not there to film landscapes. You are there to tell a story. There must be a climax, such as the summit of
a mountain, the descent of a river, the finding of a rare bird; and on the way there will be side-stories. In part these can be anticipated but the best side-stories are often unplanned.’ It was excellent advice and through it New Zealand TV viewers got to see Ed’s expeditions.
The year 1973 had seen the dawning of a new day for Hillary films. An enterprising advertising executive by the name of Bob Harvey, later to become Sir Bob and mayor of Auckland’s Waitakere City, had a dream in which he saw The Adventure World of Sir Edmund Hillary outshining The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a hugely successful, long-running TV series that had begun in 1968. He put the idea to Ed, who called together the group that always accepted invitations to join his expeditions. There was Jim Wilson, climber, canoeist, jet-boat driver and expert on Hinduism; there was me, climber, amateur film-maker and occasional doctor; Graeme Dingle and Murray Jones, who were from a new generation of climbers and had climbed the six big north faces of the European Alps. Finally came two Hillarys, Ed who had no intention of climbing vertical walls but would be part of every expedition, and Peter who was described thus by his father:
My son Peter is 21 years old – he’s a ski instructor, has his amateur flying license and is working on his commercial license; has his deep diving scuba certificate; and has already done some alpine climbing as hard as I ever did. But although he is quite happy to work hard and raise money for his vigorous activities he dropped out from university after two years and has shown little interest in making a great career for himself in the business world. He is also rather reluctant to get jobs if there’s any indication that they are influenced by his old man’s name (he frequently calls himself Peter Hill). However on the whole he’s quite kind to his decrepit father and methodically keeps a list of the money he owes me (although he’ll never be able to afford to pay it back).2
As a pilot programme for the Adventure World, I was able to promote a script I’d dreamt of for 15 years. It was called The Kaipo Wall for the 4000 feet of sheer granite at the head of the Kaipo Valley, the entrance to which was guarded by a gorge so precipitous and remote that we could find no record of anyone having forced a passage up it. The wall was both unclimbed and undescribed, though given its seaward aspect in the Northern Darrans in the south-west corner of New Zealand, any passing ship could have seen it against its backdrop of glaciated granite peaks. Ed gave the script his approval; Bob Harvey’s Daisy Films provided finance; and they employed as director and non-climbing cameraman Roger Donaldson, who later became one of New Zealand’s best film-makers before making a career in Hollywood. I was the Darrans guide and climbing cameraman.
The weather turned on its usual mix of sunshine, floods and stormforce winds. We began by opportunistically rafting down the Cleddau River in high flood, then rafted and canoed down the Hollyford River with one fierce rapid at its centre. Graeme Dingle turned a tent fly into a spinnaker for the rubber dinghy’s sail down Lake McKerrow. We walked down the deserted sandy beaches of the west coast, then turned inland up the Kaipo River – though we used a helicopter to avoid the gorge. Finally Dingle, Jones and I climbed the wall, while the two Hillarys and Wilson climbed their own route alongside the wall. The final shot was in a tent on top of the wall in a north-west storm with Ed, in a sleeping bag, saying, ‘You know, Jim, some people wouldn’t think this was fun.’ It was light-hearted, set in an unblemished natural world, an escape from real life. As Ed put it later, ‘The fact is I’m happiest with a bunch of my scruffy friends paddling down a river or walking over the hills.’3
But this was in the carefree times of 1974, and The Adventure World of Sir Edmund Hillary never achieved the multi-million-dollar future its backers had hoped for. Jacques Cousteau could breathe easily again. Nevertheless, Ed kept an eye open for the escape offered by his adventure films. There were two more during the summer of 1976, set in two of Ed’s favourite haunts: Great Barrier Island in the Hauraki Gulf; and the Clutha River in the South Island’s Central Otago.
At the northern tip of the Barrier a line of exposed basalt rock stacks rise out of a turbulent ocean. These are The Needles, and one of them, beautifully vertical, was worthy of a film. Ed landed his four climbers from a Sears rubber dinghy, timing the big ocean swells as they rose and fell against the wet foot of the rock. The sea was brilliantly blue, the foam white; ocean-going petrels flew past or dived among shoals of fish. The film was called The Sea Pillars of Great Barrier.
The second film, Gold River, used jet boats on New Zealand’s most powerful river, the Clutha, which flows through an area of dry rocky hills and alluvial flats, the site of a gold rush during the 1860s but now better known for its apricot orchards and pinot noir wines. Rapids ranged from the easy on the upper Clutha to the seriously difficult in the gorge of its Kawarau tributary. A big rapid at the Clutha–Kawarau junction was marginal, with a steep tongue of smooth water recurving into a huge white stopper wave where it levelled off. The jet boats climbed it. Then it was the turn of Ed and three others to paddle down in a small rubber dinghy. It slid smoothly down the tongue before climbing into a somersault on the stopper, emptying the four lifejacketed occupants, including Ed, into a cauldron of boiling, air-filled white water. Murray Jones, lightest of the paddlers, was the first to surface, followed by two others. But where was Ed? He explained later that he’d been walking along the bottom looking for clear water with enough buoyancy to lift him to the surface. It certainly cleared the mind of other thoughts.
Ed kept a diary throughout 1976. On 17 October he records the death of his sister June’s husband in England:
Poor June. Her Jimmy has gone and died. But she’s a redoubtable soul and she’ll bear up. She’s so different from me – it really helps her to have her family gathering around to talk about it all – while I just want to crawl away and die too. Rex has been his usual staunch self – he’s had plenty of experience with family deaths in the last eighteen months, my family, his family, and now June’s. It almost sounds as though the Gods have put a big question mark against the Hillary family. Why don’t they just gather us in and leave our families alone?4
Film topics come up from time to time:
I’ve just had a week with Mike Gill, Jim Wilson and Murray Jones down the West Coast of the South Island doing a reconnaissance of the Buller River (which has one terrifying rapid and dozens of lively ones) and the Cook River and La Perouse Glacier. The weather was bad but I enjoyed the company and felt sure we could do a mighty film if I have the nerve to do everything I’m meant to. Blood curdling! – but if the project goes ahead I’ll just have to float down everything and go to every unpleasant place I suppose.
Peter, as a newly registered pilot, took me on my first flight yesterday – in bad weather out past Anawhata, over the Harbour Bridge and Rangitoto, and back to Ardmore. Very competently done too – maybe he could be quite good at the flying game?5
In November 1976 Ed was back in Nepal on a trek which he described as ‘his last chance to get really fit’. He enjoyed the walk into Khumbu through a countryside that was green after the monsoon, with crops ready to harvest, and he was pampered by his three Sherpas. But the nights were as bad as ever. In a detached way he described a bizarre incident when a young American boy had been murdered in a teashop earlier in the year. ‘Apparently they just whacked off his head with a kukri as he lay sleeping so at least the poor devil didn’t feel anything.’6
In his diary Ed gives a bleak account of a crossing from Lukla into the Inkhu Valley and then further east to the Arun River. He was accompanied by Mingma and Murray Jones, who was hoping a reconnaissance of Peak 43 might lead to a first ascent. In late autumn the upper Inkhu Valley is an empty place, but Ed could still recognise its wild beauty:
A windy night … had tea and biscuits, then moved off at 6.50am … a long stretch of exposed snow and ice … feet were frozen … plunged down through azalea, rhododendron and pine … superb views of mountains but hard to identify in misty conditions … a very beautiful valley, ideal for my H
idden Valley film. Plenty of juniper and azalea, so we camped here.7
In the mist and damp we lit our fires … it was a fantastic scene and I kept thinking how Louise would have loved the expertise of the Sherpas as they turned damp branches into raging fires. Such a strange mixture of porters, Tamang, Kami, Sherpa. I’m so spoiled with all these people, capable of running 50 sahibs, all just looking after mournful me.8
But the nights were grim and the altitude was more of a problem than it had ever been:
A wild and ominous morning … didn’t sleep much, and some bad dreams – death of my family; disaster with Sarah; my conviction that nothing will come of the films … a series of morbid and depressive topics ran through my brain related to the house, the kids, and my lack of purpose for living. I wrote letters, gave speeches, delivered advice – none of it very happy or constructive.
… A cold fine morning but I had a hellish night with headache and severe backache. I seem to be falling to pieces … my age is beginning to tell on me and I’ll probably never be particularly fit again … Altitude worries me more. When I sleep above 14,000ft I have severe headaches.9
On 26 November, further east, they reached the Arun close to where Ed had joined Eric Shipton 25 years earlier for the Everest reconnaissance. ‘What a beautiful river it is,’ he wrote.