Elephant in the room

Kerry Packer: he loved to hunt

Kerry Packer was so convinced of his ugliness he’d compare himself to Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man. Kerry had survived childhood polio with a palsied cheek that few, if any, noticed, but he believed that political cartoonists did. During his darkest days in the 1980s, after he was forced to self-identify as the businessman codenamed “the Goanna” in the Costigan Royal Commission, cartoons of Packer loomed large on editorial pages and he’d stare bitterly at them.

In his gloomy Bellevue Hill mansion, Kerry spent most of his time in a small study dominated by an open fire. It was flanked on the left by the largest TV then available and on the right by a cabinet containing a number of guns – cannons – big enough to launch cruise missiles. But in fact designed to kill elephants. A huge pair of tusks suggested success in this endeavour while an elephant’s foot had been repurposed to hold fire irons. I’d protest against his monstrous and murderous hobby, making sombre jokes that this Elephant Man should change his name via deed-poll from Packer to Pachyderm.

It’s hard to comprehend the thrill of the kill, the pleasure some humans, if that’s the correct term, get from mowing down animals. So that they can be photographed standing proudly over a corpse – killing not for food but in taxidermal triumphalism. I have to cull on the farm, and even shooting bunnies with a .22 is a sad business. But shoot an elephant? That essentially harmless herbivore? That magnificent, highly intelligent proboscidean survivor of the Pliocene? Criminal.

We were sitting in his study when Kerry made a confession. “I’ve had a phone call from Idi Amin.” Idi being his continent’s most brutal despot, veritably Africa’s Pol Pot. “Why am I not surprised?” was my reply. “It was only a matter of time until you two found each other. But why the call?”

“He’s invited me to Uganda to shoot elephants.” A long silence. “What would that do to my reputation?” Another long silence. “I don’t know about your reputation, Kerry,” I finally replied, “but it will f..k Idi’s.”

So Kerry declined the invitation and I began a campaign to convert him from killer to conservationist. I started by explaining the existential threat to Africa’s elephants, not just from his ilk but from ivory poachers. Plus the loss of habitat and the increasing enmity of farmers whose small crops were trampled by elephants’ migratory paths.

After the Packerderm pondered matters, a small miracle and a big guilt trip occurred simultaneously. Kerry announced he’d save the elephant! Given Australia’s Kimberley was free of small farms and was on much the same latitude as the elephants’ homelands, he’d import a few dozen breeding pairs and let them loose!

I tried to explain why this noble thought was not a good idea. What if the heffalumps, like so many introduced animals before them, took off? With few natural enemies we might see a variation on the theme that gave Australia rabbit plagues, the pestilence of prickly pear, cane toad infestations, European carp rooting our rivers, half a billion feral pigs, brumbies and camels. Feral elephants, for eff’s sake? Lumbering up and down St Georges Terrace? Crushing cars? Treading on Perth’s pedestrians? (Maybe virologist Frank Fenner could update and upscale his anti-rabbit Myxoma virus for jumbos?)

Kerry’s enthusiasm to save the elephant deflated as quickly as a zeppelin shot with one of his elephant guns. And not long afterwards, a royal commission was hunting him. Exit the elephant, enter the Goanna.