On the face of it Edmund Hillary is to New Zealand what Don Bradman is to Australia. Both were men who achieved what had never been done before be it climbing the world’s highest mountain or holding cricket records that will never be broken. And both were men described by their respective countries’ Prime Ministers as heroes and given the honour of State Funerals.

But that is where the comparison should end. Where Edmund Hillary used his great sporting achievement of climbing Everest in 1953 to embark on a life of service to those who lived in the country that had brought him so much esteem and fame, Don Bradman missed an opportunity to make use of the fact that to millions in political and economic poverty in South Africa and the Indian sub-continent he was revered as the ultimate cricketer.

Consider it this way. Only seven years after climbing to the peak of Everest, Hillary established the Himalayan Trust. It has, in the past 47 years, helped to lift the living standards of thousands of Nepalese people who, when Hillary saw them in 1953, were among the poorest people on this planet.

The achievements of the Trust have been astonishing in their scope. It has built two hospitals, thirteen health clinics and thirty schools. It has improved the life of the Sherpa people through programs to control tuberculosis, smallpox and other life-threatening infectious diseases, and infant mortality has been reduced.

Bradman on the other hand, separated by only a few years in terms of sporting achievements and age, was not of this disposition. When Bradman died in February 2001 at age 92 the then Prime Minister John Howard described him as “the best known Australian name on the Indian sub-continent.”

But what Bradman did not do was capitalise on the legendary and god-like status he had achieved in these cricket mad developing world countries to help alleviate human suffering.

This is not to say that Don Bradman did not have a generous spirit. He contributed to domestic charities and in 1987 a charitable foundation in his name was established. But the Bradman Foundation, devoted to ensuring cricket can be played by all, irrespective of societal status, did not venture into India until 2005, four years after Bradman’s death.

And when it came to South Africa, Bradman recommended the cancellation of the 1971-72 tour of that country’s cricket team to Australia. But he clearly failed to use the considerable clout he had in the world sporting fraternity at the time to take a public and uncompromising stance against the horror of apartheid.

Indeed, as Brett Hutchins notes in his 2002 Bradman: Challenging the Myth, when Bradman went to South Africa in 1974 he met with John Vorster, then South Africa’s Prime Minister, and discussed only South Africa’s cricketing exile. Can one imagine if Bradman had used that 1974 visit to tour Soweto and other notorious Black slums of the time and expressed a desire to work with local activists to encourage cricket among those South Africans?

Wellington-based historian Tony Simpson wrote in the New Zealand Herald on Sunday last weekend that Hillary in the Himalayas “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.” In doing so, Simpson observed, “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.”

For Australians, we can only wish that our great hero Don Bradman, the man whom John Howard termed the “greatest living Australian”, had been as insightful and generous – and less the stunted, avaricious, sectarian bigot – as New Zealand’s Edmund Hillary. Then we could claim to have our own hero who articulated the best in us.