Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

of Kerry Packer, the Big Fella insisted on personally doing that 1983 deal from his bedside with supplier Hewlett Packard, telling its boss: ‘I’ve never paid the full price for anything in my life. Now, where’s the quote?’

A no less significant memento of that era was the provision of Packer’s Falcon 200 private jet to be on permanent standby for the collection of human organs anywhere in Australia or New Zealand. That is to say: every recipient of a transplant at St Vincent’s, Sydney from 1984 to Packer’s death in 2005—and beyond, under James Packer—has had their organs delivered courtesy of the Packer family.

In 1993, Packer picked up the bill for a lithotripter, a machine that transformed the treatment of kidney stones from a four-day hospital stay to a 45-minute treatment without need of anaesthetic.

‘They did the lithotripsy,’ recalls Sister Anthea, ‘and he said, “How much, sister?”’ She said, ‘Three million, Mr Packer’—she always called him Mr Packer when they were doing business. And the cheque came out.

Packer’s most publicised visit to St Vincent’s was after his 1990 heart attack on the polo field, where he had been dead for seven or eight minutes. His surgeon, Dr Bob Wright, explained to the still bedridden Packer how lucky he had been that an ambulance nearby had been one of the few in Sydney equipped with a defibrillator machine.

Packer, no stranger to the whim of Lady Luck, called NSW Premier Nick Greiner on the spot and relayed Dr Wright’s estimate that equipping all 888 of the ambulances in NSW with a defibrillator would cost $5 million. Packer famously said: ‘I’ll go you halves.’

The ambulance fit-out, launched in February 1991, would become the world’s largest early-defibrillation program. And the diction-challenging machines would enter Aussie argot as ‘Packer whackers’.

After Packer’s subsequent triple-bypass operation in late-October 1990, a friendship was forged with the brilliant heart surgeon, Dr Victor Chang. It would be tragically cut short just nine months later, when Chang was murdered during an attempted extortion.

Chang’s research and his memory would be perpetuated in the Dr Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, founded in 1994 with a donation of $3 million from Packer and $3 million from the federal government.

Somewhat more bizarrely, archivist Anne Cooke notes another Packer donation towards the Institute: that of a 750 kilograms, two-year-old Brahman bull named ‘Buster’, from Packer’s Newcastle Waters station in the Northern Territory. The occasion was a 1994 fundraising auction in Darwin.

It’s not likely that the animal ultimately benefitted from that transaction, but sometimes they did. In the late 1970s, Packer was a member of the board on the Western Plains Zoo, then being developed in the central NSW town of Dubbo. The zoo’s black rhino breeding program was beset with delays and faced almost certain abandonment. Packer, having already donated considerable sums to the zoo, stepped up again and saved the program.

In 2000, Packer received a kidney from his pilot and friend, Nick Ross. The operation was done at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. In the wake of that, Packer gifted $10 million to the hospital—the largest donation in its history—with which it constructed a new training facility, and rebuilt its renal transplant unit. At Packer’s suggestion, the refurbished kidney clinic was subsequently renamed the Nick Ross Clinic. Packer was reportedly less excited about the education centre carrying his name.

Indeed, it’s among few institutions to carry the name of this enormous benefactor. (The $80 million Packer-Lowy Institute at St Vincent’s, headquarters of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and other research bodies, was a 2008 initiative of respective family scions, James and Steven).

Those carrying Kerry’s name include the Kerry Packer Theatre at Ascham, the exclusive Sydney eastern suburbs girls’ school which Packer’s mother and daughter had both attended. On the other side of town, serving Sydney’s working-class west there is the Kerry Packer Institute for Child Health Research at Westmead Hospital. It arose from a donation of $10 million from Packer, backed by his challenge to state and federal governments to each match his gift.

Perhaps the greatest legacy has been that wife Ros and children James and Gretel have not only perpetuated, but very possibly surpassed, the culture of charitable giving that Kerry started.

13

ON DEADLINE

The end for Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer came at 10.40pm on Boxing Day, 2005. For months he had looked ill. Several people had described his skin as looking like rice paper. He was regularly accompanied by a medical attendant. But in many ways, the Packer planets were revolving as usual.

In late October, Kerry had been in Argentina to watch his thrice-champion Ellerstina team compete in the Argentine Open polo, which it lost narrowly to rising team La Dolfino. Packer was said to have travelled with a full medical staff.

He returned to Australia not long before Christmas, putting together a brazen $780 million pitch for five years of television rights for the AFL. It was typically Packer: a win-it-or-bin-it offer which, even if it should fail, would seriously hobble the rival Seven/Ten bid. Packer signed the bid in his Park Street office on 22 December and it was accepted by the AFL on 23 December.

Packer had just three more days to live.

It seems likely that it was on 22 December that Packer made a special phone call to his son, James.

Perhaps only Kerry Packer knew what he had planned, though there had been no shortage of hints. Or of practice runs: Lloyd Williams, the close Packer confidant who was ultimately executor of Kerry Packer’s estate, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013 that he had been summoned to Packer’s presumed deathbed three times in the final four years.

But this time was different. ‘Kerry knew he was going to die four or five days before the event,’ Williams said. ‘All his organs were failing.’

Packer had told his doctors not to prolong his life. He was a very sick man, but