Hillary called back to Base

By JULIE MIDDLETON

On the 25th anniversary of the Erebus disaster next month, Sir Edmund Hillary, 85, will give a secular reading at a morning memorial service in Antarctica and reflect on what might have been.

Hillary, Everest conqueror, Scott Base midwife and the leader of an expedition that drove tractors to the South Pole, was once a regular commentator on the Air New Zealand scenic flights.

The popular trips flew the length of NZ to Antarctica, where the volcano Mt Erebus looms over Scott Base on the edge of McMurdo Sound.

November 28, 1979, was Sir Edmund's day to commentate, but commitments in the United States called. Long-time friend and fellow adventurer Peter Mulgrew took the task. He was among the 257 killed when the Air New Zealand DC-10 slammed into Mt Erebus.

It wasn't the first such loss for Sir Edmund: his first wife, Lady Louise, and daughter Belinda, then 16, had died in a small-plane crash in Nepal in 1975.

In the bleak time after Erebus, as New Zealand went into mourning, Sir Edmund and Peter Mulgrew's estranged wife, June, comforted each other. They later married.

Next month Sir Edmund, with son-in-law David Hayman and a doctor, returns to Antarctica - the coldest, windiest, driest and highest place on Earth - for a six-day visit.

"I'm really looking forward to going back," says the genial Sir Edmund, sitting in a soft chair in his Remuera home, wrapped in a beige Team New Zealand jacket.

He has revisited the "exciting, beautiful, unique place" many times since driving a modified Ferguson farm tractor 3237km to the South Pole in 1957-58, but this time he will officially open the Hillary Field Centre.

When finished it will be, at 1800sq m, the biggest building at Scott Base, the New Zealand scientific centre.

"I greatly admire the attitude of the Government in being prepared to continue funding this programme," he said.

As Sir Edmund unveils a commemorative plaque, he will close a neat circle; in 1957, he supervised the building of Scott Base, which itself was created to support English explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs on the first overland traverse of the continent.

Sir Vivian was to leave from the other side of the continent on snowmobiles and travel through the South Pole to Scott Base. Hillary's team, which included Peter Mulgrew, would leave from Scott Base, laying down supplies for Sir Vivian's final leg.

Sir Edmund's four-man, four-tractor team started as planned. Ask Sir Edmund what he remembers most vividly and he talks proudly of navigating precisely, arriving at a supply depot he'd previously marked by plane. He recalls how the team frequently hauled wedged tractors out of crevasses, the rescuing ropes twanging as they took the strain.

And he remembers the late Sir Vivian - or "Bunny" - Fuchs, his differences with whom became worldwide news.

Sir Vivian, recalls Sir Edmund, was a rigid, command-and-control type - "he issued orders" - who never deviated from carefully laid plans.

The pair were never going to get on. Sir Edmund baldly admits that "I don't like much being number two"; neither ego was going to give way.

And Sir Edmund admits that he always had plans in mind to "have a crack" at the Pole once his duties were done, if supplies and circumstances allowed.

"Now, this was definitely not the view of the [organising] committee," he says dryly.

On Boxing Day 1957, supplies laid down, he pushed for the Pole. An unimpressed Sir Vivian summed up his reaction in one sentence in his autobiography, Sir Vivian Fuchs: A Time to Speak. "Ed Hillary decided on a quick dash to the Pole, as he put it 'for the hell of it'."

Relations deteriorated further. A few days later, Sir Vivian sent a radio message asking Sir Edmund to abandon his Pole attempt, citing the need for another fuel dump. "I had the feeling it was a final gesture to stop us from getting to the pole," says Sir Edmund in his 1999 autobiography View from the Summit.

Then, with serious safety concerns after delays to Sir Vivian's party, Sir Edmund sent a message urging him to abandon the attempt before worsening weather put everyone's lives at risk. Sir Vivian disagreed: "There can be no question of abandoning the journey."

The exchange got to media all over the world, which described a major personality clash between the stiff-upper-lip military man and the wild colonial boy. According to the New Zealand Herald, the two men's difference of opinion "eclipsed even sputniks and the Middle East in the world news".

Sir Edmund's exhausted team arrived at the South Pole at 9.30am on January 4, 1958, after 10 weeks. They ate steak and potatoes for the first time in months, and watched a Western featuring handsome heroes and beautiful heroines, all of whom Sir Edmund can still describe in great detail.

After Fuchs arrived at the Pole, Hillary accompanied him back to Scott Base, but remembers being consigned to the cold, uncomfortable rear of a snowmobile, summoned when navigational help was required.

The pair did see each other afterwards and got on well enough. But Sir Edmund says they never discussed what had happened.

Fuchs died in 1999, aged 91.

Back on the ice

* Thursday, November 25: Fly in RNZAF Hercules to Scott Base. Other guests include Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff.

* Friday: Tour of Scott Base. Visit to the Trans-Antarctica Expedition (TAE) Hut, the first on Scott Base, established by Sir Edmund in 1957 and about the size of two shipping containers.

* Saturday: Visit Shackleton Hut (1908) and Scott Hut (1902). Formal dinner at the TAE Hut in honour of Sir Edmund.

* Sunday: The 25th anniversary of the Erebus crash. Reading at 11.30am memorial service. Evening: Lecture at the United States' McMurdo Station, 3km from Scott Base.

* Monday: Tour of McMurdo Station. Afternoon: Open the Hillary Field Centre.

* Tuesday: Tour by helicopter to science projects.

* Wednesday: Fly back to New Zealand.