Artist, budding author and once the heir apparent to the largest fortune in Australia, Francis Packer was found dead at his Sydney home on Sunday.
NSW Police on Wednesday confirmed the 64-year-old, self-described “black sheep” of the Packer family had died from a suspected “medical episode”. His body was found at the modest two-bedroom Cammeray apartment owned by his elderly mother, Angela Raymond.
Plagued by years of depression and addiction, ostracised by his father, the late media baron Clyde Packer, over his sexuality, Francis Packer’s life had a rocky start. In 2014 he returned to Sydney after living in America for 35 years, still grieving the loss of his partner in the World Trade Centre in 2001.
Back in Australia he found solace, enjoyed being closer to his mother and reconnected with childhood friends as he embarked on life as an artist. He split his time between his beloved garden at Thirroul on the South Coast and the apartment in Sydney where he died.
He made it no secret he enjoyed having a lower profile than his more scrutinised cousins, telling the Herald in an interview in 2014: “There is a great pressure that goes along with having the Packer surname in this country. A pressure I was made aware of from a very young age. I was told that people would be watching me, to be wary of people’s motives … I think that’s why the family has always been ambivalent about engaging with journalists and the media, we have been burned before.”
The only child of Clyde Packer, he was the oldest of Sir Frank Packer’s three grandchildren.
“For a long time I was the heir apparent and that was made very clear to me … I was the little Packer prince,” he revealed in 2014.
However, his grandfather’s ambitions for the little boy were not to be: his succession to the Packer throne thwarted by a falling out between Clyde and Sir Frank which peaked in 1972 when Clyde famously quit the family media business. The blow up came after Sir Frank had overruled Clyde and blocked a television interview with then-Labor leader Bob Hawke, leading Clyde to move to the US where he died in exile in California in 2001.
The family chalice was then handed to Kerry, and James. That made Francis an unknown quantity to the Australian public.
Childhood friend and gallery owner Tim Olsen described Francis as “a sensitive soul” who he believed had been “often misunderstood” within the wider Packer family.
“He was the most gentle, kind man who struggled in life, but was incredibly bright. While we used to joke that he was the ‘poorest Packer’, he was too humble to admit it, but he was absolutely the most scholarly of them all. He loved history, loved art, and was incredibly well-read.”
In more recent years, Packer reconnected with his cousin Gretel, describing their relationship as “friendly”. However, he was not close with billionaire James Packer.
In 2023 he spoke about a long-term project to write a book about his high-profile family.
“I think they’d rather I didn’t do it,” he said when asked about the reaction from his cousins James and Gretel, and his aunt, Ros Packer, when they learnt he was writing a book.
“But it’s got all the elements of Succession, with the added intrigue of it being a real family and what it was actually like trying to exist within a media dynasty like that, especially when you don’t really fit the family mould like me.”
It was Francis Packers’s great grandfather, the convict Robert Clyde Packer, who began the family’s association with the media after he found 10 shillings at a Tasmanian racetrack and backed a winning horse at odds of 12-1.
It was enough to pay his way to the mainland to begin his newspaper career, before his son Frank Packer inherited his newspaper interests, which were expanded further under his uncle Kerry Packer’s reign.
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Andrew Hornery is a senior journalist and former Private Sydney columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
