Kerry Packer: 50 Days After His Passing
After watching the doco on Kerry Packer last night(WIN: 8:30 p.m. 16/2), a doco that was very positive and balanced by some of the criticism of Packer the man that can be read at this site--I recalled the only brief passage Freud wrote about biography in all his 28 volumes. Freud said that we can never really understand a man by writing about him--and I would add--by watching a doco. Today in Sydney at the Opera House there was a 'Tribute to Kerry Packer.' I would like to add my own words here even though I am aware there are many sides to a man, every man.
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In life most of us try to connect the big picture and what happens there with our life, our little picture. The juxtaposition is one of the key ways we all have of integrating our lives into some kind of meaningful whole. Here is one more effort written some 50 days after the passing of a legend, one, Kerry Packer, age 68.
PERHAPS, KERRY, PERHAPS
Kerry Packer lived through the first 68 years of the Baha'i teaching Plan(1937-2005). His independent business life began in 1974, the year I worked at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education as a senior tutor in human relations, the first human relations program at a CAE in Australia. I had been in Australia just over two years at that time. In 1974 Packer inherited 100 million dollars when his father Frank Packer died. Kerry Packer may be best known in Australia for founding World Series Cricket in 1977. That was the same year my son, my only child, was born and, although I don't remember much about the cricket for I was always stuck on baseball, a simpler game I have always thought. I do remember my son's birth. One of Kerry Packer's first and unflattering appearances in the media was in 1962. That was the year my own pioneering life began in Canada as part of the Baha'i community.
I must say I knew little of the man when he died because most of my life I have taken little interest in corporate finance, ownership of the media and celebrity in general, especially who was rich and by how much. Packer's personal interests in gambling, in sport, in business and finance and, of course, his own family, held little to no interest to me. When I saw the profile of Kerry Packer on WIN TV this evening, though, I found most of the information about his life interesting and revealing.
At age 8 he had a severe bout of poliomyelitis. I, too, suffered when young from some pathoanatomical knee problem whose name I can not now recall. Packer's life began eight months after the start of the first Baha'i teaching Plan which began in April 1937. For me, it is the curious juxtaposition between Packer's life, my life and the life of the Australian Baha'i community that has led to this prose-poem. -Ron Price with thanks to WIN TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 16 February 2006, "The Big Fella: The Extraordinary Life of Kerry Packer."
You certainly seemed to be
a man of energy, very human,
very kind, honest, calling a
spade a spade, as they say.
I'm not sure how much a doco
of 60 minutes tells the story
of a man's life. I guess it makes
a start, gives a few angles,
creates an impression of sorts.
A gift for ordinary conversation,
meeting-the-man, not the retiring
quiet sort of chap if you know what
I mean, made connections easily,
could easily be one of the boys.
Kerry, you had no belief in a life
to come but, perhaps, your stone
cold body was a sign that all your
life could not be gone and only one
place seemed likely: that Country,
the Undiscovered One, that Shelley
called It and where you now may be.
Perhaps you will now have
a new language with a 1000
conjugations for the word love,
where laughter will be spelled
in capitals and sadness will grow
obsolete. I trust food and affection
will be yours for that wink of yours
and, perhaps, light will say all that
needs to be said. Perhaps, Kerry,
perhaps!
Ron Price
February 17th 2006.
