Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to set foot atop Mt Everest, Chomolungma or Goddess Mother of the Snows, is dead at 88.

He was to climbers, even to the least of climbers like myself, a generous but blunt and straight-talking man. He was blunt in recounting that he stood first on that apex of the world against the dark cobalt blue of space and that Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was second.

Yet he was so untouched by notions of self importance that he never had himself photographed on the summit, with the plume of wind-blown snow beneath the upraised ice axe carrying the Union Jack and the Nepalese flag.

The man in the goggles holding the flags is Tenzing who just happened to be second to step on the highest point above sea level after they had taken turns making their way along the final ridge.

“It was no bloody place to teach him how to use a camera”, Hillary said. But it never occurred to him that he should teach him either. Hillary never saw fame coming, nor sought it, but he used it for immense good, building schools in Sherpa communities, and lending himself to practical things that made a difference.

So it isn’t Hillary but the second man to reach the top of Everest that is in a picture that is as iconic as that of Buzz Aldrin, second man to step on the moon, and taken by the first man Neil Armstrong.

Hillary was personally generous to those of us on the ANU Mountaineering Club expedition to Dunagiri in 1978, which was climbed by future Everest climber Tim Macartney-Snape, supported by Lincoln Hall. He pulled strings for us to ensure a frostbitten Lincoln was given swift and comfortable retrieval by an India Air Force chopper from base camp, and a first class seat back home on Air-India.

And while he has said of the mystery of whether George Leigh Mallory and Sandy Irvine ever reached the summit before they disappeared in 1924 that it was “coming back alive” that counted, he was generous in acknowledging that they might, just might, have made it.

Indeed, one of the first things he did on the summit back on May 29, 1953, was to stare down the Tibetan face and ridge line that they were to climb and look for “any trace”.

Around his beloved Mt Cook this evening the news will reach climbers in the huts and bivvys. Those who knew or know of Hillary will most likely set off on the routes to its summit before dawn, inspired by his comment on returning from Everest, which was “We knocked the bastard off.”

Even today climbers talk about “doing a Hillary”. It means, don’t bugger around, just do it.