There is a version of the Packer story that rarely gets told. Not the casinos, the cricket wars, the billionaire headlines. The other version: the one about the cousin who looked at one of Australia's most formidable dynastic inheritances and, by choice or by circumstance, walked away from it.
Francis Packer has been found dead in Sydney, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. He was the son of Sir Frank Packer's elder son, Clyde, which placed him a generation ahead of his first cousin James in line to inherit control of the family's media and broadcasting interests. For a period, according to his own account, that expectation weighed on him directly. "For a long time I was the heir apparent and that was made very clear to me," he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014. "I was the little Packer prince."
That inheritance never arrived. Clyde Packer fell out with his father Sir Frank in the early 1970s and left Australia permanently, removing his branch of the family from the succession. Kerry Packer took over the empire on Sir Frank's death in 1974, and the rest, as the saying goes, is Australian media history. James Packer eventually inherited a fortune valued at many billions of dollars. Francis inherited something different: the freedom, if not always the ease, of obscurity.
In the years that followed, he built a quiet life as a visual artist, based on the New South Wales south coast. He was openly gay at a time when that fact alone placed him at odds with the conservative social codes the Packer dynasty had long embodied. He described his father as someone who never wanted to know about his sexuality. "My passion is art and photography," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It's where I can express myself."
Friends from the arts community praised him following the news of his death. His was a life that had been described as troubled, defined at least partly by the gap between what his surname promised and what his temperament, and arguably his values, actually wanted.
Strip away the Packer name and what remains is a story that is, in its own way, genuinely affecting: a person who resisted the gravitational pull of extraordinary dynastic wealth, not through scandal or ruin, but through a sustained and deliberate choice to live differently. Whether that constitutes personal freedom or personal loss is the kind of question only Francis could have answered.
The circumstances of his death were not disclosed at the time of publication. He had reportedly been working on a memoir about his years inside one of Australia's most scrutinised families, described as a warts-and-all account expected to expose what he called the family's "many locked-up secrets."
The Sydney Morning Herald, which first broke the news of his death, noted that artist friends praised him warmly. For those who knew him in his chosen world rather than the one he was born into, he was remembered not as a footnote to James Packer's story, but as a figure in his own right.
The Packer family has not publicly commented.