Speakers

Sir Edmund Hillary was New Zealand's greatest hero. The tall, gangly beekeeper seized world headlines when he and his Sherpa companion Tenzing Norgay, on May 29, 1953, became the first to scale the summit of Mount Everest.

He died on January 11, 2008, aged 88. Sir Ed - as all New Zealanders knew him - never forgot that he reached the summit with Tenzing and he devoted the rest of his life to fundraising to improve the health, education and environment of the Sherpa people of Nepal.