Book reveals Stokes' early life

Before he owned television stations, Kerry Stokes installed TV aerials on the roofs of homes in Perth's suburbs.

That well-known tale is part of the Stokes legend in WA but it is not - as has been widely reported until now - where the billionaire's working life began.

When he arrived in Perth in the summer of 1960 from Melbourne, a 19-year-old armed with a driver's licence that said he was 22, Mr Stokes had already been in the workforce for five years.

Extraordinary new details of the early childhood of Mr Stokes, one of Australia's leading business figures and chairman of Seven West Media, publisher of The Weekend West, are revealed in The Boy From Nowhere, a biography by award-winning Melbourne journalist Andrew Rule.

The book will be launched by the author and its subject on Monday.

Some of the details are likely to be revelations even to Mr Stokes, who co-operated with Rule by giving him access to records and sitting for dozens of hours of interviews.

Mr Stokes has not read the book and is unlikely to for several months, if at all, and had no control over its contents.

"I've interviewed hundreds of people over 35-odd years and very few of us are very good witnesses in a legal sense," Rule said.

"We conflate things together, Chinese whispers are at work, we believe things we're told by older people when we're young and they become articles of faith.

"For example, Stokes thought, because he was told by his adopted mother, that he came from the Broadmeadows babies' home.

"Well, it would appear that that is not the case. Why would his mother tell him that? I don't know, I have no idea, but these things happen."

Rule's book begins with Mr Stokes' early life, the adopted only child of loving but poverty-stricken parents in Melbourne's working- class suburbs. Had his birth mother, a Carlton barmaid, kept him, he could hardly have been more poor, Rule said. "They lived in what were basically slums, the sort of houses that were later bulldozed and replaced with high-rise tenements by the Housing Commission," he said.

"Although in some ways I think he is probably now grudgingly grateful for the start they gave him in life, he didn't feel that way as a young man. He felt all he wanted to do was get away from it and not live like that."

A left-hander who was forced by the brothers at his Catholic primary school to write right-handed, Mr Stokes was afflicted with undiagnosed dyslexia that made classroom learning a struggle.

But what Rule describes as a "native intelligence" began to emerge towards the end of primary school.

The brothers recommended that Mr Stokes go on to high school but the family could not afford it.

He joined the workforce at 14.

His first job was in the radio factory of Melbourne industrialist Sir Arthur Warner. His task was to apply the fine, red "cat's whiskers" to radio dials with pliers.

Kerry Stokes the businessman, in 1990.

"He buggered up a lot of them and at the end of the day he had a pile of radios with crooked cat's whiskers," Rule said.

"He claims Sir Arthur came in and demanded, 'Who's stuffing up my production line!' He didn't get his apprenticeship and had to go off with his tail between his legs."

An athletic kid and an early developer, he joined the Preston Harriers Athletics Club after beating men off the front marker at a union picnic. At the Harriers he met future Olympians Kevan Gosper and Bevyn Baker, teaching him about discipline, the value of contacts and the wider world.

At another job at a wool store, he convinced management he was 17, not 14, earning him a few extra bob.

The payslips formed the basis for a driver's licence that moved his birthday back to 1937 rather than his actual birth year of 1940, allowing him to get a driver's licence early.

He bought a truck, then worked in a mechanic's shop, before a falling out with the proprietor led him to travel to Perth, where a girl he had met at a dance in Heidelberg lived.

Spying just desolate scrub out the window on arrival in early 1960 at the Guildford Aerodrome, Mr Stokes wondered if he wasn't better off getting on the next plane back to Melbourne.

With a little bit of cash, a Gladstone bag and some homemade running starter's blocks, Mr Stokes talked his way into the aerial installation job after spying an advertisement in The West Australian.

"No one knew anything about putting up aerials, so he spent three days in the library learning about it," Rule said.

"That gave him his start in Perth and he could see there was going to be a land boom."

The blocks of land were bigger and better than those in Melbourne - and less than half the price.

Mr Stokes put a deposit on one for himself and, with a rented suit and a freshly purchased shirt and tie, got a job with the selling agent, the St Georges Terrace businessman H. G. Seymour, over lunch at the WA Club.

"He took a punt that he could sell, and he did," Rule said.

"He would sell three blocks to the other guys' one. Although he did very well with Seymour, after a while he suggested that he take a little slice of the business, like 5 per cent or else he might have to leave.

"Mr Seymour said, 'Well, we'll have farewell drinks on Friday, see you later'.

"He didn't know Seymour's brother was coming home from overseas to take over. He talked his way out of the best job he ever had and he never worked for another boss again."