In 1986, Hill had been retired from polo for 11 years. He was 52 years old; Packer, 48. But Hill must have sensed that a sport Packer actually liked, one that might actually hold his attention and keep him coming back, could literally mean the difference between life and death. And so ‘Kerro’ had himself a polo coach.

  Packer very quickly had everything imaginable to go with it. Within a year, his new recreational pursuit was accelerated by another once-in-a-lifetime experience: Alan Bond. Packer said to John D’Arcy of the Herald & Weekly Times, ‘I’m going to take three years off and get fit and then I’m going to come back and buy television stations for half the price their new owners just paid for them.’

  With typical determination and a no-less-typical torrent of cash, he began to construct world-class polo estates at his Ellerston property in NSW, reportedly with more than 160 horses in air-conditioned stables. Equivalent facilities were established in England (Stedham, near his Fyning Hill estate), ‘Ellerstina’ in Argentina, and a smaller estate in France.

  Biographer Paul Barry estimated that Packer burned through close to $150 million on this new obsession, which quickly extended to two teams: Ellerston Black and Ellerston White. Packer’s ongoing outlay didn’t only include the costs of breeding, keeping and transporting horses, but the no less testosterone-fuelled demands of professional Argentinian polo players, who would travel with Packer and James through the calendar of tournaments in Spain, France, England, Argentina and Australia.

  Packer’s heart attack during the 1990 Australian Open Polo Championship in Sydney, covered in Chapter 10, did not dampen his enthusiasm for the game; he returned to Warwick Farm the very next weekend to watch James play. He continued to push himself to even higher levels, while equally channelling his efforts into the breeding of ponies and the development of his estates.

  His Ellerstina venture near Buenos Aries, Argentina with polo patriarch Gonzalo Pieres was revolutionary in the manner and scale of its embryo programs and player training camps. Ellerstina has won Argentina’s prestigious Open six times, the first three of those in Packer’s lifetime (1994, 1997 and 1998).

  The 38-hectare Great House Farm complex in Stedham, West Sussex was likewise a formidable, purpose-built polo complex. It was sold in 1999. The nearby Fyning Hill was sold in 1990 for £12 million to Russian businessman Roman Abramovich. This 178-hectare estate was said to include a seven-bedroom house, stables for 100 horses, two polo pitches and a go-kart track.

  Packer watched his son James’s Ellerston Black team win the British Open Gold Cup in 1994, and he led his own Ellerston White team to victory in 1995 and 1998. Polo led to the rough diamond from down-under winning the Queen’s Cup, presented on more than one occasion by Queen Elizabeth II herself.

  Daughter Gretel told the Australian Women’s Weekly after her father’s passing, ‘He loved that it’s like chess on horseback; a game of strategy and skill, and both an individual and a team game. He loved that he could be on the same field as the best in the world.’

  John Bary, a former six-goal professional polo player, left no doubt of Packer’s polo legacy. After his retirement in 2011, Bary told Melbourne’s Herald Sun: ‘The big money is overseas in polo, but Mr Packer lifted the bar and did a lot of service to the sport in New Zealand and Australia.’

  Ellerston’s polo facilities are said to be second to none in Australia. If it’s second to any in the southern hemisphere, it would only be Ellerstina in Argentina. It has as many as eight polo pitches, an oval racecourse, hi-tech stable facilities and an equine hospital.

  Packer, aside from his commendable polo conquests, enjoyed playing golf, and in the mid-1970s was able to benefit from some pro lessons. This meant owning the course—The Australian, in Sydney—and picking up tips on swing and stance from Jack Nicklaus.

  Packer would also get a good-sized glimpse of what it was to be a champion golfer. In 1992, he was invited to play in the AT&T Pro-Am tournament, the world’s most prestigious pro-am event, held at Pebble Beach near Monterey, in Northern California.

  He had played pro-ams before—one, in Ohio in 1978, partnered with Jack Nicklaus, former president Gerald Ford and comedian Bob Hope—and the Pebble Beach event at least once before, in 1979, again with Nicklaus. For 1992 he would partner fellow Australian Greg Norman, at the time usually ranked among the top three in the world. The two had known each other from a meeting eight years earlier at The Australian golf club in Sydney.

  Packer hadn’t been spending much time on golf, and he took the 1992 challenge seriously. In Sydney he had Ron Luxton, the long-serving pro at The Australian, help him tune up his swing. Then he flew in Mitchell Spearman, golf instructor from the hugely exclusive Lake Nona Country Club in Orlando, Florida. Spearman spent two weeks in Sydney giving private lessons.

  Norman and Packer strode to victory by six shots, shooting a 42 under par. Packer, with his handicap, contributed 38 of their under-par shots. Their 246 remains the second-lowest winning score in Pebble Beach Pro-Am history.

  But more than Packer’s playing, it was something that happened just prior to the game that had truly impressed Greg Norman. In the days after Packer’s death in 2005, Norman told the story to veteran Sydney Morning Herald golf writer, Peter Stone.

  ‘We walked onto the first tee to hit off and they had Kerry’s handicap down as 21. “Kerry, is that your handicap?” “No, it’s 18,” he replied. That’s the character of the man. Most amateurs would have said “I’ll take the 21,” saying, “Shit, OK, great, I’ll take the extra shots.” But Kerry, with his high morals and high ethics, said no and we won by six shots.

  ‘To see Kerry as happy as he was at the end of the day, that’s what life is about. Achieving that. Money doesn’t buy that stuff.’

  After the match, the US-based Golf World asked Packer how it felt to win the event, compared with closing a big business deal. ‘This costs more,’ Packer quipped.

  Greg Norman would soon become more entwined in Packer’s golfing life, as all—or certainly most—of Packer’s sporting dreams culminated in the haven he created for himself and his family at Ellerston.

  Arguably the jewel of Ellerston is the golf course that Packer commissioned from Greg Norman, as he and then business partner Bob Harrison moved increasingly into golf course design. It hosted its first game in 2001.

  Norman explained in The Bulletin’s tribute issue to Packer that the catalyst had been a strange theory put forward by the proprietor. ‘Kerry always had a belief that any golf course in the world could be played using a putter. It might take several hundred shots to get around, but he believed there was no course that could defy his putter theory. So he wanted one that could.’

  Co-designer Harrison, who left Greg Norman Golf Course Design in 2009, explained the process to Planet Golf USA: ‘The first task was to work out where to put the golf course on a 75,000 acre property. The manager … wasn’t a golfer and thought that the best place for the course was probably on top of the extremely steep ridges. But there was a beautiful, fast-flowing stream in the valley below, where I thought the course should go—and much of it did—even though it meant moving the polo ponies to new pastures and building a number of extensive bridges to link the paddocks beside the creek.’

  Harrison had also said that the course, which might see half a dozen rounds played on it each week, was designed for experienced players. ‘It was done specifically for the Packer family and they can hit the ball,’ he said.

  The Great White Shark himself said: ‘At Ellerston we were able to create a course that a golfer of my calibre would love to play every day for the rest of his life.’

  Greg Norman, who became a close friend of Packer’s, would have bittersweet memories of Ellerston, and the world-class golf course that they’d built together over many determined discussions.

  ‘My greatest regret,’ Norman told The Bulletin after his friend’s death, ‘is that we didn’t do it 20 years earlier, as I never got to play a round with him. When I played, he’d come around in the cart.’

  9

  PACKER’S TOYS

  It was the late 1970s. The jungle drums of Sydney’s petrol-head scene rumbled with sightings of a mythical wild cat. It was low, loud, with the power of two Formula 1 cars and a muscled-up body that bulged rudely over tyres as fat as a tractor’s. One report, claiming to know the whereabouts of its lair, said the beast spat fire at anyone who went near it.

  For all that, the beast was only as mysterious and fearsome as its rumoured owner: Packer.

  The man behind the world’s most expensive, powerful, unreliable and inflammable Jaguar XJ-S was Kevin Bartlett. A multiple Australian motor racing champion and engineer, Bartlett was a versatile and aggressive charger in single-seat formula machines and touring cars, both here and abroad.

  According to a story related in Christopher Lee’s Howzat! Kerry Packer’s War, Packer may have succumbed to the XJS’s Rubenesque charms while in London during the September, 1977 High Court case against his World Series Cricket. Packer and his controversial WSC signatory, Tony Greig visited a Jaguar showroom to look at the car.

  Packer asked the salesman about the colour availability. On being told there were five hues from which to choose, Packer ordered one of each, and distributed four of them among his favoured executives.

  Jaguar had launched the XJ-S in 1975, as the replacement for its fabled E-Type. Jaguar’s V12 engine produced a reasonable 220 kilowatts (295 horsepower), but the XJ-S’s size, weight and thirst relegated it to the role of a posh boulevardier aimed at the American market.

  Packer suggested that Bartlett might do something to make his XJ-S go faster. Bartlett, who raced hairy-chested, 375kW (500 horsepower) Formula 5000s around the world, reasoned that if this was worth doing, it was worth over-doing.

  Bartlett had met Packer around 1979 when the race ace received a call asking if he’d be willing to give some driving lessons to Mr Packer. Bartlett suggested the Oran Park race circuit, south-west of Sydney.

  ‘We hopped in the car, I think it was the XJ-S and I took him around,’ recalls Bartlett.

  ‘After a little while he said: “Enough of this. I want to have a run around, you tell me what I’m doing wrong”…

  ‘I’ve often thought the reason we hit it off was that I was actually telling him what to do. That can only lead so far with Packer before he says, “Well, fuck—don’t tell me to do it that way!”

  ‘I said, “If I tell you to do something, it’s because you need to know the next step. If you can’t do it the way I want you to, you just go and do your own thing. And when you crash, don’t fuckin’ blame me.”

  ‘I knew who he was, but to me he was just a rich businessman. He said, “Do you know who you’re talking to?” “Yeah, I’m talking to a bloke I’m trying to teach how to drive” … So he said, “Alright then, show me!” And it went on from there.’

  On the circuit, Bartlett says, he could readily see that Packer ‘was quite a good steerer’, with a flair for driving quickly.

  Bartlett also recognised he was getting some respect.

  ‘Once we’d got over that argumentative stage, which didn’t last long—he was a very forgiving guy, in a lot of ways—it turned out it wasn’t a mistake to be that insistent. What he respected was that I’d stuck to my guns.’

  Packer, it seemed, was happy—or at least able—to defer to others who were expert in their particular field and had the confidence to assert it. Thus, characters like helicopter pilot Nick Ross, polo mentor Sinclair Hill, cattleman Ken Warriner and a small circle of others, became trusted confidants.

  Bartlett found himself propelled into that inner circle as the go-to guy for motoring matters. In short order, Bartlett would be servicing Packer’s cars at his Sydney race workshop, jetting off to source high-powered toys, accompanying him on automotive adventures, designing a go-kart track for the Ellerston property and, most visibly, carrying Channel Nine sponsorship on his Formula 5000 and Chevrolet Camaro racing cars.

  The adventure would run until the end, 25 years later.

  But back to the beginning and the fire-breathing Jag.

  A new technology, among passenger cars at least, was the turbocharger: a turbine pump that crams ever greater quantities of fuel and air into the engine, creating prodigious power—for so long as the engine can take the pressure.

  ‘I said, we’ll put a couple of turbochargers on it,’ Bartlett grins. ‘But it was a complete and utter bloody disaster, the whole way along …

  ‘We estimated it got up to about 1200 horsepower [895kW], before we backed it off to about 800,’ Bartlett says. ‘You couldn’t drive it very often—you couldn’t drive it around the city because it was a complete dog, and that’s what Packer didn’t like about it. The carburettors would jam and then the car would catch fire.

  ‘It never caught fire with him in it, thankfully. But it did with me, a couple of times.’

  It was a work in progress. Bartlett strove to resolve the issues of delivering fuel, keeping the engine cool, and strengthening the transmission system to handle the power of two contemporary F1 cars. And between times, having to blast it with a fire extinguisher and clean it all up again.

  ‘Then one day he rang me—or his secretary rang me—and said, “KP wants to go down to Canberra, is the XJ-S ready?” I said, “Well, it is.” She said, “Go up to the house to collect him and you can go down to Canberra.” I thought: “Shit”…’

  Bartlett was understandably less than confident of the big Jag’s ability to make the trip—around four hours, prior to today’s freeway—without self-immolating.

  ‘So I picked him up, and he said, “I’ve got to get to Canberra in an hour and a half, two hours tops.” I said, “Well, we won’t do it in this.” He said, “Why the fuck not? You said you just tuned the fuckin’ thing up, why won’t it do it?” I said we’ve never done that sort of distance before … “Just hop in the fuckin’ thing and shut up, I’ve gotta get to Canberra.’”

  At the wheel of the Jag and thundering up to speed, Packer instructed Bartlett to phone the office and have his helicopter dispatched to follow them. The Jag had a head start of about 35 kilometres when the chopper lifted off from Channel Nine.

  ‘We get to Mittagong,’ Bartlett says (a distance of 115 kilometres from Sydney) ‘and Christ alone knows how many police cars were after us by that time. I wasn’t looking at the speedo, but we were going hard, waaa-waaaa, top-gear stuff. And suddenly he says, “I haven’t seen that chopper. They’re supposed to monitor where I am. Where’s the fuckin’ chopper?”’

  ‘There wasn’t much phone coverage in those days, and I had to ring someone and get them to ring someone. Eventually, somebody says: “The chopper pilot says he can see you in the distance, but they can’t catch you!”’

  By Mittagong, Bartlett was panicking that the Jag would set a signal fire for them. ‘The thing was starting to smoke, the gearbox was smelly and I thought, ohh, shit … I said look, I’ve just got to pull up and check the gearbox oil … He said, “But I’ve gotta get to rah-rah-rah,” but I explained that we wouldn’t get there if the gearbox blew up.

  ‘Naturally, it was pissing oil everywhere, I was waiting for it to catch fire again, and he says, “I’m not gonna make Canberra in this, am I?” So I phoned the chopper and we got to somewhere near the Bong Bong Racetrack … the guys landed in farmer Fred’s paddock, and Packer’s over the fence and off. “See you in Canberra!” he says.’

  Bartlett did make it to the house on Mugga Lane, albeit several hours behind the car’s owner. ‘He said, “Oh, you got it here,” and I said yeah, but I took it pretty easy. And he said, “Well that’s not what I’m fuckin’ payin’ for, is it?”’

  Packer kept the Jaguar for perhaps five or six years. Bartlett says that pretty much every time he took the car out, something else would break. The car became almost useful the more they scaled back the engine power, settling on that of just one Formula 1 car. Then it caught fire again.

  The burnt-out Jag was salvaged and rebuilt to fight another day. There was a popular story that the subsequent owner, Sydney Jaguar mechanic Gary Walker, had a favourite trick of sticky-taping one end of a $50 note to the glove box lid and challenging a passenger, under the full force of the Jag’s acceleration, to try and retrieve it.

  But Bartlett is convinced that, for all the angst caused by the Jaguar, Packer enjoyed the entire saga.

  Why not just buy a Ferrari, or a Porsche 911 Turbo? ‘Oh no, he wouldn’t do that. It had to be an individual thing, a him thing.’

  OUT OF THE AUDINARY

  Audi is today one of the most respected players in the luxury car market. But back in 1980, few Australians had even heard of it, or had reason to pay any attention if they had. Audi’s, certainly weren’t the sort of cars to excite a car-mad tycoon homing in on a nine-figure net worth.

  In March 1980, however, at the Geneva Motor Show, Audi unveiled the Quattro. The muscular, high-performance coupe was revolutionary in that it featured four-wheel drive, a technology previously focused on plodding, off-road utility vehicles.

  Four-wheel drive made this turbocharged coupe uncatchable in wet, slippery or gravel road conditions—the playgrounds of the tough sport of forest rallying.

  News of the game-changing, all-wheel drive Audi crackled through to the Australian specialist car magazines. But it was soon clear that the Quattro, being built only for the European market, would be yet another in a long line of exotic cars that would forever elude Australian buyers.

  Well, all but one Australian, who had the clout to hijack a car and enlist the help of Audi’s top engineers to rebuild it.

  In early 1981, Kevin Bartlett received a call from Audi’s Australian public relations manager, Phil Scott (who would, much later, become publisher at Packer’s ACP). Scott was staring at a physical example of the Quattro, diverted through Sydney en route to a dealership in Madagascar.

 

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