Kerry Packer was larger than life, but very much in life. This book is a collection of stories, gathered from people who knew him, from those who have documented him, and from the folklore that inevitably grew up around him. At heart, they’re just stories of a remarkable Australian.
Kerry Packer was probably destined to be remarkable—one way or another. He was born on 17 December 1937 into circumstances that rarely seem to produce inconsequential types. A look through the ledger of Gettys, Hearsts, Fords and Kennedys suggests that a child in this kind of family could turn out as either a brilliant and respectable scion, or a frustrated and rebellious dropout.
In young Kerry’s case, for a long time the odds appeared to be stacked towards the latter. And if the popular version of Packer family history is to be believed, the tallest hurdle to acceptance was his tough and uncompromising father, Sir Frank.
In the 1979 book As The Twig Is Bent, Kerry said of his father: ‘There are any number of people who can go out and fly a jumbo jet, but there’s a very elite group of people who can design it and make it work, and my father was a designer and a person who could make things work … I was able to fly the plane he built, but I couldn’t have built it.’
According to Kerry, Sir Frank’s Consolidated Press empire was founded on an inheritance from his father, the gruff, tough Smith’s Weekly newspaper pioneer, R C Packer, who died in 1934. Kerry estimated that inheritance at £10,000, around $175,000 in today’s money—though many figured it had been rather more.
In 1931, at just 25 years of age, Frank had already made a small fortune from a masterful piece of publishing bluffery, involving the mooted launch of a cheaper rival to Sydney’s Sun. The innovative Australian Women’s Weekly, launched in 1933, gave the Packer play even more momentum.
Tales of Sir Frank Packer were legend around Australian Consolidated Press (as it was known from 1957), even decades after his death in 1974. He was said to have often returned to the office from long, late dinners and randomly fired any employees who happened, through diligence, to be still at their desks.
‘Younger journalists would be often distressed by this, and the older hands would say, “Don’t worry about it, just come back in on Monday”,’ says Patrick Cook. The cartoonist worked on several ACP titles, including The Bulletin and Cleo.
The late Donald Horne, who served many years on Packer’s Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin, recounted in his 1985 memoir Confessions of a New Boy being sacked for taking a company car on an assignment to rural Cessnock, 160 kilometres from Sydney. Frank blasted him for not catching a bus.
Another employee, it was said, made the fashion error of wearing a red cardigan to work. On seeing this, Sir Frank observed, ‘I see you’re a Communist. You’re fired.’
A favourite story concerned a young lad who was leaning on a desk, apparently chatting up the receptionist. Sir Frank strode up and collared him from behind. ‘What’s your pay each week?’ he thundered. ‘Thirty dollars, sir,’ said the startled kid. Sir Frank thrust his hand in his pocket, leafed out a wad of notes and thrust them into the kid’s hand. ‘There’s four weeks’ pay. You’re fired!’
As the kid slunk off down the hall, the chairman barked after him: ‘What department were you from?’ To which the kid replied, ‘I don’t work here. I’m a courier.’
Paul Barry, in The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, reported a different version, centred on Sir Frank’s unwritten claim on a particular lift in the Park Street building. The doomed ‘employee’ who happened to be inside when it stopped in front of the raging Sir Frank was a deliveryman from the Post Office.
The elevator attitude chimes with Patrick Cook’s recollection. ‘That’s what they said about Frank: “It’s Frank’s world, you’re just living in it.”’
Despite the Packer wealth, it cannot have been a cushy childhood for sons Clyde, born on 22 July 1935, and Kerry two years later. Kerry, however, would always staunchly defend his ‘strict, but magnificent’ father and his mother Gretel who, he said, ‘believed that her function in life was to look after her husband and I don’t disagree with that.’
When he was five, Kerry was sent to boarding school—in Cranbrook, just a few hundred metres from the family home in Sydney’s elite Bellevue Hill. The threat of Japanese invasion prompted his parents to send him to live with an aunt in Bowral, 120 kilometres south-west of Sydney. There, at age seven, he contracted polio, the disease that paralysed lungs and limbs and left many children from the mid-1940s with lifelong, crippling injuries.
Kerry spent nine months in a Sydney hospital in an iron lung, before being dispatched to Canberra under the care of a nurse. He spent two years there, making a total of four years away from his parents.
As told in As The Twig Is Bent: ‘I had seen nothing of them, except for seeing my mother perhaps half a dozen times. It was the war and my father was working for the army and my mother worked hard in the Red Cross. It wasn’t a matter of their not wanting to see me, it was a matter of getting on and doing things, which is something that I believe was right.’
Illness, long absences and as yet-undiagnosed dyslexia conspired to make the remainder of Packer’s schooling a chore. He directed his energies instead towards sport, and at Geelong Grammar in Victoria, where he was sent to board at age 12 or 13, he was a vigorous competitor in everything from boxing and rugby to cricket and tennis.
The latter sport
