KEY POINTS:
There's no doubt that if you stopped 100 New Zealanders in the street, without exception, they'd all agree that Sir Edmund Hillary was a hero. But they might be at a bit of a loss if you asked them why.
We don't go much on heroes in New Zealand. We admire a few sportsmen, and more latterly women, or the someone who has made a name elsewhere and happens to be a New Zealander. But these people get their 15 minutes or so of fame, then they are forgotten.
One of the great heroes when I was a boy was Pat Vincent, who captained the All Blacks during the glory days of the 1950s. Who recalls him now? A few rugby historians perhaps.
Most New Zealanders, when told someone is a hero, look first at the feet of the person designated to see what sort of clay they're made of. But not Sir Ed; he went on being a hero to us for more than 50 years, and I suspect it's going to stay that way.
That's not as odd as it might seem. It's just that we have a rather quirky take on what makes a hero.
If you make an especially notable contribution to something you might get your face on the money, for example. Sir Ed's on the money, although it must have been a bit of a freaky experience to see a picture of yourself every time you bought a beer.
But that's not enough in itself. No one I know wants to deny Ernie Rutherford his due.
There's no doubt he made a contribution to physics, up there with Newton, but he doesn't count as a hero.
The same goes for Apirana Ngata and Kate Sheppard. They're pretty admirable, but they aren't what any of us would call heroes in the way we regard Sir Ed.
The reason for that, however, isn't so easy to pin down. Its most curious characteristic is that it's mainly compounded of negatives.
Our true heroes are the ones who don't exhibit the character traits we don't like. It's partly to do with an expectation of modesty, of not showing off.
There's no earthly reason you have to be a beekeeper to conquer Mt Everest, but it seems appropriate to most New Zealanders that a genuinely modest man should have a genuinely modest but useful occupation.
But it's not that simple either, because in New Zealand we have two sorts of modesty, one of which counts and the other doesn't.
You can see the one that doesn't whenever some of our leading footballers score a try.
They jog back to position with head down, their whole demeanour saying: "It was nothing, really" when everyone knows that isn't true. They reckon they've done a hell of a job. It's a modesty which is so self-effacing that it can't help but draw attention to itself to such a degree that you might as well put up a neon sign.
That's not what we mean by the modesty Sir Ed had. Charlie Upham, another of our real heroes, is another case in point, and not just his fellow soldiers but everyone who met him commented on it.
He was notorious for turning and abruptly walking away if anyone tried to quiz him on his exploits, notwithstanding that they were astonishing to the point almost of disbelief.
I met him once, briefly, and I'm as sceptical about heroes as any New Zealander, but there was no doubt he had whatever the modesty is that genuine heroes have.
If I had to define whatever the modesty is that genuine heroes have, I'd say it's the same spirit which informs our sense of humour - wry, distanced, perceptive of but sympathetic to human frailty, laconic and very low key - utterly unlike the brash and assertive humour of the Australians or the Americans.
When Sir Ed conquered Everest he famously said: "We knocked the bastard off". Everyone in New Zealand grinned at that. We knew what he meant and recognised it for the sly joke that it was. Note the "We". He didn't say that "I" knocked the bastard off; he said "we" knocked the bastard off. Our social ethos is one of collective endeavour.
The same goes for getting to the South Pole ahead of Sir Vivian Fuchs.
I have no doubt that every New Zealander in the Polar team was irritated to a greater or lesser extent by the English way of doing things, the insistence that everything must be just so. They probably thought that was a funny name for a bloke anyway.
But, Sir Ed, being one of us, didn't confront that directly, he just identified something which he knew would deflate this pompous English upper class twit, and did it. A lot of us laughed up our sleeves at that, too. We knew what he was up to.
But I've often thought the key to whatever it is that defines heroes like Sir Ed lies in Upham's apparently paradoxical willingness to talk about what his platoon had achieved.
In fact, there's nothing paradoxical about it at all. We judge one another not by our individual accomplishments but by what we contribute to the team, or to the community, or to any other group with whom we engage in any sort of enterprise.
John Mulgan, who thought about this a great deal, and who wrote possibly his best book about it, Report on Experience, summed it up.
Speaking of what it was that characterised our soldiers when he encountered them in North Africa, he was particularly struck by the contrast they formed with the English soldiers with whom he, although a New Zealander, was serving.
They had none of what he described as the "tired patience of the Englishman, nor that automatic discipline that never questions orders to see if they make sense".
Instead: "They were mature men, these New Zealanders of the desert, shrewd and sceptical. Moving in a body, detached from their homeland, they remained quiet and aloof and self contained.
"They had confidence in themselves, such as New Zealanders rarely have, knowing themselves the best that the world could bring against them, like a football team in a more deadly game, coherent, practical, successful.
"Everything that was good from that small, remote country had gone into them - sunshine and strength, good sense, patience, the versatility of practical men."
In this unique, egalitarian society of ours we are all heroes as long as we play our part.
It has nothing to do with what some critics call the tall poppy syndrome, which is just a lazy excuse for not thinking. Properly understood it's one of our abiding and most-attractive characteristics.
And every now and again someone comes along who seems to us to enshrine those virtues in their person. They become for us not so much heroes as icons.
Ed Hillary is all of us, and what many of us admire most about him is not just that he was the first person to conquer Everest.
That was a major accomplishment and one he could have rested on for the remainder of his life. Instead, he asked himself: what next?
Looking around he saw people who needed schools and clinics and the sorts of chances in life that we take for granted. It seemed perfectly natural to him that he should spend the best part of the rest of his life making sure that as far as possible the people of Nepal got them.
That's what makes him a hero to me, and it also explains his legacy. Ed Hillary will live on with us because his life encompassed who and what we are as New Zealanders, and what we might aspire to and yet become.
* Tony Simpson is a Wellington-based social and cultural historian.
