Australia, India and Sir Ed

Ask a Kiwi sports fan who he supports in international competition and a likely answer is "New Zealand and any team playing against Australia."

It’s rather like the Scottish football supporter faced with great difficulty in deciding what means more to him, Scotland winning or England losing (regardless of their opponents).

It is hardly surprising therefore that there was little sympathy for Australia on this side of the Tasman in their cricketing conflict with India, resulting from incidents during the second Test match between the two sides. Antagonism between the two threatened to go well beyond the sporting sphere, involving charges of racism (by an Indian player), blackmail (by the Indian cricket authorities, who threatened to call off the tour if the charges weren’t dismissed and an umpire - who admittedly made two bad decisions that went against them, removed for the remaining games), and about deplorable behaviour by the Australians.

An Indian player may or may not have called the only coloured member of the Australian team ‘a monkey’, but comments such as those of the Australian coming on to bowl that, "I can’t wait to run through you bastards," are not primarily intended to promote cordial relations.

In New Zealand, the Australian cricket team are commonly described as ‘hunting like a pack of wolves’ who will stop at nothing to secure victory. ‘Sporting spirit’ is not considered a term that exists in their vocabulary. Interestingly, the clash with India also brought a lot of criticism about their behaviour from within Australia.

On the other hand, there has been little sympathy here for the Indians either. If the Aussies throw their weight around on the pitch, the Indians, who have the greatest financial clout in the game, have been throwing their weight around off it. For a time, the New Zealand media were full of it, and not just the sports pages and programmes, but news headlines, leader columns and letters to the editor.

At the moment, a truce has been called and the third Test begun with damage limitation exercises all round. But most of that was swept aside in this country by the death of (Sir) Edmund Hillary, for many years affectionately known here as ‘the greatest living Kiwi’.

Noone has anything but kind words to say about him. A humble beekeeper, his achievements in the Himalayas and the Antarctic brought him great fame, but he remained the archetypal, modest, unassuming outdoor-type New Zealander. He also did much to aid Nepal, helping to found schools, clinics and community projects. The fund he supported is continuing its work.

What bothers me is that he is constantly referred to as the first man to climb Mount Everest (occasionally with the addition of ‘and return’, for George Mallory may perhaps have reached the summit 27 years before him in 1926 — he was last seen a few hundred metres away, but never heard of again). It is almost as though Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who was with Hillary, and without whom the feat would not have been possible, didn’t exist.

Hillary himself always enjoyed very good relations with the Sherpas, by whom he is held in the highest regard. As the Auckland-based Herald On Sunday put it. He ‘clicked’ with them right from the start. ‘He thought they were like New Zealanders.’

Footnote: A letter to the editor of Wellington’s Dominion Post asks how long it will be before the Australians claim Hillary as their own?