From the Arctic Circle to the Southern Alps, the lauded adventurer has descended with avalanches, slept in fear of polar bears and survived three marriages. With his autobiography documenting his wild life now on the shelves, Sir Graeme Dingle KNZM MBE, turned 79 yesterday. He talks to Emily Simpson.
School was hopeless – a waste of time for everybody. I just kept saying what am I doing here? I don’t get this place. Even at secondary school, it carried on – I’d think why are we doing Latin? I don’t see any point.
The breakthrough was really a teacher who said ‘Graeme you could be a great artist’ … and I went ‘wow’. I did pursue painting for a time but then discovered the mountains and found I was very good at running over rough country and steep ground. The art side of me turned out to be important too because I found I could go to publishers and say ‘give me an advance and I’ll go on an adventure and give you a book’, and being a photographer helped.
The first time I set a goal was to break the record for the crossing of the Tararua ranges which had been set by an extraordinary athlete called Cyclone Sinclair, one of the best mountain runners in the world. I smashed the record, I took 45 minutes or something off it. That was powerful because it taught me that if I could apply the objectives of achieving a goal, I could achieve anything.
I went to South America and climbed a whole lot of high mountains and drifted down the Amazon on a raft and had this goal of being the first in the world to climb all the European north faces of the Alps in one season, which hadn’t been done before. On the north face of the Matterhorn I got close to [regretting] it but each time I just responded to the challenge of surviving.
I found I could tolerate a lot of discomfort. A little bit like that scene in Lawrence of Arabia, I learned it wasn’t that something hurt, it was caring that it hurt.
Before each climb you ask yourself, what’s the problem with this climb? With the Eiger, in Switzerland, it’s falling stones. There are also large sections of ice to cross and most of them are raked by serious stone fall and if the stones don’t hit you they slowly wear away your will to be courageous. We said, okay if we can control the stones we can control the climb, and that meant climbing only when the mountain face was cold. As soon as the stones started falling we’d stop climbing, and it meant stopping about 3pm and then as soon as we heard the stones stop falling at about 2.30am we’d start climbing. We climbed the central part in the dark. We didn’t go for a fast climb, rather a safe climb.
Fear is quite different to pain. It can completely crush you if you let it, of course. I don’t remember ever being that scared that I became useless. There’s usually a point where you’ve broken through the fear and you say to yourself, what the hell let’s go for it.
As a kid I was scared of everything. I was terrified of the dark. Scared of the bush. Scared that there might be snakes in my bed. I was scared of school. Scared of asking questions. Eventually I got to a point where I said this is stupid let’s not be scared of everything, let’s face each of these fears and get over yourself and that happened – by the time I was 23 I really did feel I was bomb-proof.
I started driving like a crazy thing. And I eventually drove my car into a stone wall in Wales, it was a miracle that I survived, the car somersaulted about 100 metres, I had probably been thrown out through the windscreen and I found myself crawling around in a farmer’s field. I just had bad cuts on my head and front teeth knocked out but it did shake me up. I wasn’t confident about climbing for about a year. I must have been 24.
In 1970 I left the UK and drove overland and drove to the Himalayas from London and joined Sir Ed on an expedition. He was my hero, a lovely man. We went into the Khumbu, which is the area at the base of Everest, we did lots of trekking, no serious climbing but an extraordinary number of projects to help the Sherpa people: built a bridge, renovated a couple of schools, built water pipelines mainly. I learned a lot of things from him, he was scrupulously honest and I think that I tried to be like him in that way.
Back in New Zealand I did the first ever traverse of the Southern Alps with a woman called Jill Tremain. She said to me one day, ‘Graeme life’s a cup to be filled, not a measure to be drained’. I said ‘what the f**k does that mean?’ and she said ‘you’re quite a selfish person, you’re consumed with all these ideas of heroic climbs but you won’t fill your cup until you do things for other people’. When the traverse was over I went and borrowed a lot of money and set up a trust and established what is now the Hillary Outdoors Education Centre, in Tongariro. I was 26 and acting on a wing and prayer.
On that trip I fell about 350 metres in a huge avalanche which would have to be the most terrifying thing that has happened to me. I stood up at the bottom and I was basically naked. I’d said to Jill, ‘you wait here, I don’t like the look of this,’ and a moment later I was in the middle of it. Jill had stopped on the edge. But she died a few years later in a massive avalanche in the Himalayas.
Being in an avalanche is like being the bottom of the most horrendous scrum. You’re just being pummelled from every angle, the wind being knocked out of you constantly, it’s hard to imagine how rough it is. Your clothes ripped off, your pack ripped off. I managed to find my pack and repair it but I couldn’t find my ice axe… I got over it.
I did a circumnavigation of the Arctic that took about 400 days. I was the first person at that time to go through the northwest passage in winter by myself. That was a bit of a struggle, not recommended really. I slept every night with a shotgun tucked inside my sleeping bag – the fear was Polar bears. They’re extraordinary creatures. Very big, very fast, they can pick up a 400 pound seal and smack it into the air with one arm.
Jo is my third wife. My first marriage broke up as the result of an ocean-to-the-sky exhibition with Ed Hillary; we took three jet boats and went from the Bay of Bengal up into the mountains. I was gone for three months and I came back to find her with someone else. So it did put a strain on relationships yes, but that was pretty much what I did, I was a professional adventurer.
The second marriage was to Corina Gage who’s a famous waka paddler and the mother of my daughter Ariaan who was born in 1985 (I have grandchildren now). As a parent I think I was away too much. Jo [Jo-Anne Wilkinson] had shares in a cabin near our house down at the southern end of Lake Taupo, she used to visit Corina and me from time to time and we were friends for years. Essentially Corina said to her, ‘I like you, take him off my hands’.
There was obviously a physical attraction, but I also liked Jo’s intelligence and as it turned out, her courage. She was able to put aside life’s setbacks and cut to the chase and get on with what had to be done. At the end of the northwest passage of my Arctic journey, Jo came out and joined me in a little inflatable boat made in West Auckland. We were in the Bering Sea and our boat ruptured along the keel. I was thinking the best thing to do would be to get to the nearest piece of land, but Jo just looked at me and said ‘you drive and I’ll pump’. She doesn’t have an outdoorsy background, I got her into all that. Now we’ve got kayaks down on the river (near our house) that we just put in the water and take off.
I’ve seen so many kids transformed by the outdoors. That’s my greatest feeling of fulfilment – that I’ve been able to help so many young people through The Graeme Dingle Foundation which is dedicated to empowering kids through youth development programmes. I’ve also learned the principles of keeping something going. With a profit motivated company there’s a clear bottom line. Our bottom line was proving that what we set out to do actually worked, and I think that goal has sustained us through the 30 years and the 400,000 kids who’ve come through the programme. That’s the same number again that have come through the Hillary Outdoors Centre. Jo-Anne is key to that as well – keeping the charity going – we have the perfect combination of skills. She’s a lawyer, so that helps keep things safe.