Softly spoken media magnate Kerry Stokes knows a thing or two about throwing punches.
Mr Stokes, who chairs Seven West Media, has a multi-faceted view of what it is to be Australian after growing up on the streets of Carlton in inner Melbourne in the early 1950s.
"I considered it my God-given right to protect our streets from all of the Italians," Mr Stokes told a breakfast launch of his biography in Perth on Monday.
The deeply private businessman opened up to an audience of business people, celebrities and media, including billionaire James Packer and boxer Danny Green.
"We fought street by street and they were bloody battles," Mr Stokes said.
"We hated those `wogs', as we called them. We hated them because they were working at the wool stores for non-union wages and they were cooking thistles and eating off the smell of an oil rag."
But Mr Stokes explained that the antagonism towards Italians dissipated when Carlton football star Sergio Silvagni, an Italian, began playing for the AFL club in 1958.
"It changed, and Australia is constantly changing for the better," he said.
Mr Stokes' biography The Boy From Nowhere, by journalist Andrew Rule, gives an insight into the Perth-based businessman's tough beginnings in post-war, multi-cultural Australia through to his first big break landing a sales job and dining with Perth's elite.
While examining his successful business career, as well as some big deals which went wrong, Mr Stokes speaks about hardships faced by his countrymen, the idea of mateship and what it means to be Australian.
He also singles out Vietnamese refugee boat people who arrived on Australian shores in the late 1960s and 70s as leaving a rich legacy.
"I don't think there's ever been a wave of immigration to Australia that's brought us such riches and given us so much back for the investment we made keeping them here," he said.
The Boy From Nowhere is published by Harper Collins.
Share
