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Kerry Packer: Tall Tales and True Stories, by journalist Michael Stahl, 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.
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Kerry Packer was instrumental in shaping Australia’s media landscape and culture. For 30 years he controlled television’s perennial ratings leader Channel Nine, and a large percentage of the nation’s most influential magazines. So much of what Australians watched, read and believed came through the prism of this larger-than-life man. Beneath all the billionaire clutter, Kerry Packer had plenty in common with the average Joe: a cheeky humour, a competitive drive, deep love for his kids, a passion for sports and movies. In business, Kerry Packer would fight to the last dollar in a deal. Yet the same man would take his private jet to Las Vegas and lose more than $20 million in a week – then leave a $1 million tip. In his Park Street, Sydney office, where the visitors’ chairs were clustered in front of his giant desk, Packer would verbally dissect a hapless executive, but no less often, the very same man would step in silently and invisibly when hardship or tragedy struck a loyal staffer or their family.
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Packer bulldozed through his dyslexic condition with a steel-trap mind and by asking an awful lot of questions. The son of a father who shunned him, he inherited a business in 1974 valued at perhaps $100m. When he died 31 years later, on Boxing Day 2005, he would hand his own much-loved son, James, control of a media, property, agriculture and gambling empire worth $6.9 billion.
Packer was a true Whale in the world of gambling, and some may attempt to explain it as a big man who, accustomed to operating on a big scale, needed super-sized thrills.
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But the Big Man himself once conceded: ‘Betting is like a disease, which is not understood by those who do not have it.’
The young Kerry Packer may have been the scion of a media dynasty, but in the early days he was paid miserably by his father — who, it was said, took much of it back again in board.
Packer well knew these inner-Sydney alleys of illegal casinos, sly grog shops and SP (starting-price) bookmakers.
Amongst those who the book quotes was Gary Linnell, a famous journalist of the era: “He inhabited that town when Sydney wasn’t all sparkling like it is today,. Sydney was a tough town, it was run largely by gangsters, through all these backstreet meetings and dens of iniquity. Kerry moved within it, and then he moved above it. Kerry’s greatest passion was gambling. He lost and won big money.”
Michael Stahl has won numerous writing awards, including industry association Publishers Australian Journalist of the Year in 2011.
iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Mac
Free Delivery Worldwide
Delivery in Australia & NZ
Kindle