The Rich Are Different

This is the scene outside Kerry Packer's house in December. Kerry was the richest man in Australia. He made a million dollars a day every day for the last year of his life. Not that it was enough to keep him alive. Or in some respects even happy. I remember once having to go and stake him out outside the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital; being driven there by a jolly, beaming little Bangladeshi taxi driver who was delighted and grateful to be alive; while the country's richest man lay in his expensive hospital suite and at that moment might have given anything to exchange places with someone who was beaming, happy and poor.

I always knew that one day I would find myself staked out in the leafy, bat swooping elegance of Bellevue Hill, outside Packer's residence. The dreams would come thick and fast and I knew that tied up with these dreadful, inconsequential stories, were the dictates of one's own fate, the falling leaves, the swooping birds; muffled by time, muffled in dreams, with other voices, other intelligences, barely out of conscious reach.

I had always been envious of the rich; a negative trait, I know. Their lives seemed so substantial, in contrast to our own whispy ways. The stolid mansions around the Packer's compound, the flash cars, their substantial lives and substantial trust funds; I just felt, I don't know why, that these things were rightfully mine; that as time passed life would bless me with substantial fortune. Such of course was not to be. One foul wind would sweep all the evidence of his life away; the trail of words, the computer, the television, even the kids; it had taken years to get on a sound footing and it could all be thrown away so easily; an arsehole at work, a terrible mistake. The surveillance.

He had locked in his memory the location of the house, in a part of Sydney, just behind Scotts College, where every square inch was worth a gold mine, the Packers owned a compound stretching from one street up the hill right to the other side, with long driveways that led down to their private mansion passed other guest houses that they also owned. People came and went all day in a lifestyle that was beyond almost everybody; the funeral man, the flower man, the fish monger, the milkman, the laundry man; the staff, the gardeners, the security, the rottweiller dogs that would have cheerfullly mauled us alive. In those muffled dreams; when he knew he would be here; the turning points came and went on a dying fall, the heavy air cascading down the tree trunks, the wealthy queens in the neighbouring houses, the sycophants who mooned around the rich, who hung, watching the bored and restless and media because they had nothing else to do; in the end he had always known he would be standing here one day.