The Outsider

It was enthralling, in a ten-car pile-up kind of way, to watch the cyclone of rhetoric that blew through the media in the weeks after the death of Kerry Packer, much of it devoted to cementing his place in the national memory as ‘one of us’. An ordinary bloke, who loved a beer and a punt and watching a game of footy. So relentless was the effort, so unbroken the wall of sound put out by an army of heralds, that it threatened at times to completely obscure the base reality that Packer was not one us. He was something very different, a man with a will to power so great it wouldn’t even allow him to die in peace.