Creating the mirage: Christopher and Pixie Skase

Kate White

The public image of Christopher and Pixie Skase in the early 1980s was of a successful, good-looking couple. Within a few years it was transformed into an image of a wealthy, high-flying duo with a grand mansion on the Brisbane River, a A$6 million yacht, a private jet and plans to relocate to Hollywood, as well as extravagant parties on the Gold Coast and at Port Douglas where their empire built the Mirage resorts. And finally, they are remembered as the couple who fled Australia owing huge debts to financial institutions and investors. The Mirage not only became the name of their Queensland resorts, but also a metaphor for Christopher’s career as an Australian entrepreneur in the 1970s and 1980s when he and Pixie carefully crafted an image of themselves as the darlings of Australia’s new entrepreneurial elite. This article explores their backgrounds and what motivated them to create and sustain their mirage. Decades later, they are still remembered as a couple who tried to evade justice. Christopher became one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives when he and Pixie refused to return. Despite a campaign to bring them back to Australia, they remained in Spain where Christpher died of cancer on 5 August 2001. Pixie eventually returned in 2008 and lived quietly in Toorak. She died in 2024.

There are few Australian biographies that focus on couples who were both in public life, as I have noted elsewhere, but there are biographies of other Australian entrepreneurs who fell from grace, such as Alan Bond, Nathan Tinkler and Laurie Connell. They also were shunned by the Australian public, but Skase’s determination to remain a fugitive set him apart.¹ While there are several that deal with couples in politics—such as John Rickard’s book on the private lives of Alfred Deakin and his wife; Susan Mitchell’s (2014) Margaret and Gough: The Love Story that Shaped a Nation; and Carolyn Rasmussen’s (2019) joint biography of Doris Hordern and Maurice Blackburn—there are virtually none that concentrate on couples in business. An exception is Couples That Work, in which couples in 30 countries were interviewed about how they tackle the challenges of combining love and work.² This article adds to the biographical genre in Australia by focusing on Christopher and Pixie as a very public couple who were also involved in developing a business empire. It encompasses both their public and private lives and seeks to move beyond the polarity that Brown observed of ‘a persistent disappointment at the failure of Australian biography to push beyond the public surface of the subject’ and the ‘injunction that it is primarily the public domain of the subject that is the essential concern’ of the biographer.³

Here, rather than a traditional historical narrative, the task is to tell the story of ‘the shape’ of Christopher’s and Pixie’s lives⁴ and early careers in a way that is accessible.⁵ Exploring the notion of power is also an important part of the story. As I have noted elsewhere, it is often difficult to determine the wellspring of power; rather, biographers tend to observe how biographical subjects exercise power and their response to it after they have stepped down from an influential career.⁶ In exploring the Skases’ formative years, the article will examine why power was important to both Christopher and Pixie, why they were fascinated with it and how they exercised it to build the Qintex empire.

The Skases were one of the highest profile couples in the tumultuous 1980s. It was a decade in which ‘the media celebrated entrepreneurs, turning them into stars’, with the Bulletin calling Christopher Skase the ‘Man with the Midas Touch’.⁷ But even within the excesses of the 1980s, ‘the extravagance of Christopher and Pixie Skase was legendary’.⁸ After they fled Australia once Qintex collapsed in 1989, they lived in exile in Majorca and refused to return to face several court hearings regarding their business dealings. This prolonged exile exasperated governments and financial institutions and gave Christopher ‘probably the worst image of any of the corporate cowboys of the 1980s’.⁹ At the time, they were said to owe hundreds of millions on guarantees to banks. As one commentator noted, Christopher, ‘alone among the tallest of the poppies, escaped to sneer at both his pursuers and those he had duped’.¹⁰

This article attempts to push beyond what Brown calls the ‘public surface’ of the couple by focusing on their formative experiences and early years in public life. It examines the world of the Melbourne business establishment and the unwritten rules about gaining acceptance from, and being promoted by, this powerful group. It also explores how the Skases constructed a public image of a dazzling, very successful, business couple, and argues that investigating their early years can help us understand first, how they became powerful; and, second, the mirage that both underpinned their dazzling success and ultimately contributed to their fall from grace in the late 1980s.

Christopher Skase was a young man in a hurry. His interest in tourism and property development stretched back to his early 20s. After finishing secondary school at Caulfield Grammar, he took a summer break at the seaside town of Anglesea, Victoria, and by the time he came back to the city had decided, unlike most of his classmates, not to go to university.¹¹ Pursuing a degree would have forged vital friendships and networks to help build a career once he graduated. That decision probably cost him easy access to the world of the Melbourne business establishment that he craved throughout his early adult life. Instead, he went to work at the staid Melbourne stockbroking firm of J. B. Were which, in earlier decades of the twentieth century, had had strong links with several Liberal Party leaders.¹² Two years later, frustrated that all his hard work had not been rewarded with a promotion, he resigned, bought an old Falcon and set out on an Australian odyssey.¹³ He spent the next 14 months working in various menial jobs—sweeping a railway station, delivering letters and labouring.¹⁴ He travelled to northern Queensland where one spot impressed him: the pristine white sands of Four Mile Beach at Port Douglas which had the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system, and Daintree National Park, a stunning biodiverse rainforest, within easy reach. He later recalled that he had a vision as he stood on this unspoilt coast of creating a luxurious international resort.¹⁵ He then headed across the parched, dusty outback to Western Australia and took a job at a mine so that he could gain some understanding of how the mining industry worked.

He returned to Melbourne just after his twenty-first birthday in September 1969 and went back to live with his parents. His father, Charles, was a radio announcer whose family had migrated to Australia in the 1920s. (Originally of Scandinavian origin, the name Skase was mainly found in the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.) Although not well connected in business circles, Charles used his influence to get his son a job in financial journalism at the Sun News Pictorial, a daily tabloid with the biggest circulation of any newspaper in Australia.¹⁶ When Trevor Sykes took up the position of finance editor with that newspaper in the early 1970s, he was immediately impressed with the serious and hardworking Christopher who had a flair for investigating the performance of publicly listed companies.¹⁷ Soon after, Sykes was offered the role of Melbourne bureau chief at the Australian Financial Review and persuaded Skase to go with him. Even then, Skase had his sights set on a bigger and more prestigious career, and the power and influence it might generate. He struck up a friendship with fellow journalist John Byrne and in 1972 they bought a double-fronted terrace house in Clara Street, South Yarra. They each borrowed A$10,000 from a building society and paid A$19,000 for the property. John recalled that Christopher was fascinated by money and the power of money, and that he craved wealth and the approval of, and backing from, Melbourne’s financial and social establishment.¹⁸ At the time, Christopher was having an on-off romance with Elizabeth, a doctor’s daughter from one of the better suburbs in Sydney. They eventually married at St Mark’s, Darling Point. The couple returned to Melbourne and moved into the Clara Street home, but soon fell out with Byrne who decided to leave for South America to make his fortune.¹⁹ Elizabeth showed little interest in business and finance which was by now Christopher’s all-consuming focus, and shortly afterwards their marriage ended.²⁰ He had a passion for secrecy and kept his private life to himself, so he did not tell any of his colleagues about the break up.²¹

Christopher was tall, slim and handsome. He paid great attention to how he dressed. Even as a young journalist at the Financial Review, he always wore a smart three-piece suit with a brightly coloured pocket scarf; in fact, he was the best dressed journalist in the office. However, despite his good looks, he was shy. He maintained a private inner core and talked little about his private life. When the Financial Review journalists rushed to the pub in the late afternoon for a few pots of beer before returning to the office to write their copy in the early evening, Christopher often had little to say. He was normally quiet, but colleagues sensed that there was a lot going on in his head.²² Nevertheless, he appeared to be well connected and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of corporate Australia.²³

Christopher used to say to colleagues that financial journalism was the best paid research job; as he avidly absorbed knowledge about corporate Australia, they realised that he was becoming ambitious to start his own career as a financier.²⁴ Therefore, no-one was surprised when, with only A$15,000 behind him from the sale of his share of the Clara Street property, he left the Financial Review in September 1974 and a month later, aged just 26, formed an investment company that he called Takeovers, Equities and Management Securities (or TEAM Securities),with three experienced businessmen whom he had persuaded to partner him in the venture. Skase had less money to start his new career than any other Australian corporate raider who rose to fame in the 1970s and 1980s.²⁵ TEAM installed him as managing director on a salary of A$15,000 per year and soon took control of a small Tasmanian listed company Ludbrooks Ltd, which had retailing, mining and exploration interests, renaming it Qintex Ltd in late June 1975.

Christopher often talked about his burning ambition to become a millionaire by the time he was 30.²⁶ In order to achieve that goal, he needed to gain attention and acceptance from the Melbourne financial establishment. They were generally middle-aged men from well-connected Victorian families who had gone to the top private schools such as Scotch College, Melbourne Grammar or Geelong Grammar, then studied law, commerce or economics at the University of Melbourne while living at Ormond College, and were likely to be members of the exclusive Melbourne Club at the ‘Paris end’ of Collins Street or one of a handful of other private clubs around town.²⁷ The importance of gaining acceptance from this business elite became clear to Skase when TEAM tried to take control of two Melbourne institutions: the Victoria Hotel in Little Collins Street in April 1975, popular with farming families when they came to town; and later Georges, the city department store patronised by the wealthy Toorak set.²⁸ The Victoria Holdings Board did not take kindly to outsiders—let alone outsiders with a 26-year-old managing director—trying to take over and dug in. In the world of Melbourne business in the 1970s, newcomers needed to exhibit some gravitas and be connected to existing corporate networks, which the inexperienced Skase could not demonstrate. He was particularly annoyed at the response to TEAM’s attempt to purchase Georges, seeing the resistance of its board as the Melbourne establishment defending its own. He railed against the corporate and social power concentrated in a few families who did not accept outsiders or interlopers like him, and declared in exasperation that he may as well have been from Argentina, given the hostility he experienced.²⁹ This anger remained with him. Years later he recalled:

I copped the cold shoulder all over town. I was denigrated and isolated and given no encouragement whatsoever. That has long lived with me and I will never forget it.³⁰

Perhaps the establishment just questioned his business skills and saw him as ‘cocky’?³¹

Christopher’s financial career now took a new direction as disagreements started to emerge between the members of the TEAM Board. By this stage, TEAM had control of the Victoria Hotel and had secured a substantial holding in Georges; it had also purchased the Victorian Broadcasting Network (VBN), which operated several provincial television and radio stations. While Skase was managing director of TEAM, he had no equity in the firm. His only stake was a small holding in Qintex Ltd. When the board found out that Skase had purchased shares in a listed company, Lustre Jewellery, in May 1978 without telling them, it asked him to explain. But Christopher bridled at being accused of secrecy and was unrepentant about buying shares without first consulting them. He told the board that it was too slow, and intimated that he was not going to hang around and work with people like them. It was now clear that, unlike the board which preferred a cautious approach, he was a risk-taker and wanted to move on. The result was that Skase resigned his TEAM position and negotiated with the board to receive TEAM’s stake in Qintex Ltd as well as $75,000 in cash.³² This was perhaps the first indication that Skase could be single-minded and not consultative in his business dealings.

At last he was his own boss. He also had some money to push ahead with acquiring new investments and his focus was on making a quick profit by asset stripping. At just 29 years old, he was the youngest chairman and chief executive of any publicly listed company in Australia and was starting to get noticed by financial journalists; however, as he well knew, he was also still an outsider without access to influential business networks. His entre into the world of the Melbourne establishment did not come via a prominent businessman, but an unlikely woman, Pixie Frew, with whom he crossed paths in late 1975. She was tall, stylishly dressed, with well-coiffured blonde hair and a poise, confidence and smile that could light up a room. Pixie had all the social graces that Christopher lacked. She came from an old Melbourne family, the Symes. Her forebear was the Scottish/Australian proprietor of the Age, David Syme, who was incredibly influential in nineteenth-century Victorian politics. Importantly for the impatient, budding financier, she was extremely well connected with Melbourne business and social circles through her family ties and previous marriages.

They met at a Christmas dinner party in December 1975 at the classy Red Lantern Restaurant in Bourke Street, Melbourne. Pixie, then 35, had been invited by her brother-law Ian Curtis and sat alongside Christopher. She recalled that they had a lot to talk about. Christopher, then aged 27, was a marvellous conversationalist and had all manner of unusual philosophies and controversial views, according to Pixie; she had never met anyone quite like him. He told her early on that, apart from his business interests, he only had A$170 to his name.³³ But on that day their stars aligned, and they would soon embark on an exhilarating yet risky journey.

Theirs was an unlikely romance. Joanne Nanette Dixon, known as Pixie, had grown up in the eastern suburb of North Balwyn, which has ‘always maintained an air of suburban exclusiveness’.³⁴ Her widely respected father was the night manager at the Age, and she and her younger sister were educated at a private school. Her teenage years were difficult. By the age of 17, she had by her own admission become ‘very destructive’.³⁵ This description hints that she realised she could wield power, even in a negative sense. When Pixie and Christopher met, she already had two failed marriages. The first was to Albert Argenti, Melbourne’s famous singing waiter. While Albert did not achieve an international singing career, he made several recordings and performed in London. When they married, Pixie had graduated from being a rebellious teenager to a successful model.³⁶ Pictures show a beautiful young woman with high cheekbones and an elaborate hairdo pulled away from her face with carefully crafted curls.³⁷ Modelling gave her a taste for the finer things in life, such as stylish clothes and quality jewellery.

Albert had a colourful background. His Italian father, Giacomo Argenti, was an anarchist. As a young man, Giacomo was put under surveillance in Italy for his suspected activities. He emigrated to the United States in 1912 and, when he returned to Italy five years later, was arrested and sentenced to three years goal after police found dynamite in his room at the family home in Copoliveri on the island of Elba. On his release, he emigrated to Adelaide, where he worked on the waterfront and was joined by his wife and son Gualberto. Life as an anarchist took a toll on his health. Giacomo suffered bouts of depression and in 1936 was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. As he aged, his politics changed radically and he became a supporter of Mussolini, even sending a petition to the dictator in 1940 asking for financial assistance to send his son to Italy to study singing.³⁸

Albert was older than Pixie. They had three daughters, Amanda, Felicity and Kate. The couple’s different cultural traditions possibly played out awkwardly in their marriage. The first generation of Italian migrants in Melbourne were often close knit and had traditional family values. Albert’s mother had come from a small village; having a daughter-in-law with a dazzling career in modelling was a far cry from her humble origins. It is not known how Pixie adjusted to her Italian in-laws. Albert worked initially at Mario’s restaurant in Exhibition Street, Melbourne, and was then maître d’ of the Savoy Plaza Hotel in Spencer Street, which became renowned in the 1950s and 1960s as a top hotel and night spot. He went on to establish Albert Argenti Receptions in North Balwyn.³⁹ Given Pixie’s earlier rebellious spirit, the expectation that she would be a mother and homemaker in the Italian tradition may have been stifling. Eventually, the marriage fell apart.

Pixie’s next relationship was with George Frew, a prominent Melbourne businessman who owned the Commodore chain of hotels and motels. George, a country boy made good, had none of the rich cultural heritage of Pixie’s first husband. He was born at Cowra, a small town in the central west of New South Wales, and started his working life as a salesman and bicycle repairer. Ambitious for his own business, he bought shares in the Rough Range oil boom of 1954 and used this windfall to purchase the cooperative store at Cooma, the largest town in the Snowy Mountains. The store was successful and he went into partnership with a local policeman and a builder to construct Cooma’s first motel, which was a huge success. George was a pioneer developer of motels at a time when there were very few in Australia. He quickly expanded his motel empire to Melbourne, which became its headquarters.⁴⁰ He built the Old Melbourne Motor Inn on Flemington Road just north of the city, which became a top spot for dining in the 1970s and for visiting entertainers such as Liberace, the American pianist, singer and actor; Peter Allen, the Australian singer-songwriter; and ABBA, the Swedish singing sensation.

George was a rising star in the business world. He had an interest in racehorses and enjoyed mixing with the racing fraternity and Melbourne’s social set. In these circles he met and fell in love with Pixie Argenti. He soon left his wife and set up house with Pixie and her daughters.⁴¹ Three years after they moved in together, he divorced his first wife and married Pixie who was then pregnant with their daughter Alexandra. The family moved to a spacious mansion in Toorak. Pixie actively supported George’s career, including his unsuccessful 1972 campaign to win a seat on the Melbourne City Council—she went out on the hustings, canvassing retailers and even passers-by on the city streets.⁴²

Despite strongly supporting George’s business career, Pixie appears to have fallen out of love with him. She hired a nanny and began going out on the town.⁴³ One of her favourite haunts was Maxim’s in Toorak Road, which was more refined than most restaurants and considerably more expensive. Behind the charcoal grey façade, yellow blinds and geranium window boxes was a little bit of Paris. Inside, murals in the style of Renoir, with a touch of Toulouse-Lautrec, oozed a suitably Parisian feel.⁴⁴ At Maxim’s Pixie met influential businessmen and politicians, including Harry M. Miller a self-confessed philanderer with whom she had an affair. Miller was a New Zealand/Australian promoter, publicist and media agent who became a household name, bringing to Australia Louis Armstrong, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Judy Garland and Ella Fitzgerald among others, and launching Australian productions of the highly successful musicals Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and the Rocky Horror Show. He described Pixie as a bubbly and sexy woman. He recalled that while George adored her, she felt stymied in the marriage. Miller found Pixie a lot of fun, both socially and romantically, but added that there was a degree of old Melbourne snobbery about her. Apart from Miller, Pixie was friendly with Don Lane, the American-born talk show host and singer, then at the height of his Tonight Show fame on Channel 9, as well as several well-known Liberal Party figures who frequented Maxim’s.⁴⁵

Increasingly disenchanted with what he called ‘Melbourne apathy’, George, with Pixie and the four children, relocated to Thailand, where he was pursuing new business ventures, in 1974.⁴⁶ It was perhaps an expedient move to get Pixie away from Melbourne and the social set in which she moved. But Pixie was deeply unhappy, especially when, in January 1975, she was put under house arrest in a Bangkok hotel after her visa expired.⁴⁷ By now the marriage was seriously strained. George, deciding that it was over, divorced Pixie later that year.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, Pixie appears to have lived with her four children at his Old Melbourne Motor Inn after the divorce.

When Christopher and Pixie met at that dinner party in December 1975, they were both recently divorced and emotionally vulnerable. They soon discovered that they had a lot in common. Both had gone to good, but not top, private schools: Pixie had gone to Methodist Ladies College and Christopher to Caulfield Grammar. Neither had gone to university at a time when children from comfortable, middle-class Melbourne families were expected to do so. They had also come from traditional backgrounds, with fathers who worked long hours and mothers who were homemakers; and they shared a love of music. Pixie’s first husband was a finalist in that venerable institution, the Sun Aria, and Christopher’s father, a radio announcer at 3DB in Melbourne, had won the Sun Aria in 1948.

Christopher, besotted with Pixie, arrived one afternoon at the Old Melbourne Motor Inn in his MG sports car with a large bunch of flowers.⁴⁹ He later telephoned Pixie and invited her out. She agreed, but only if her four girls, aged between mid-teens and five, came too. It was an unusual first date: Pixie and the girls piled into his car with the roof down and had a fun day out.⁵⁰ From the outset, Christopher warmly accepted her daughters and used to quip that while he missed out on the nappy stage of parenting, he was delighted with his new family.⁵¹

Early on in their romance, Pixie became actively involved in Christopher’s business ventures. As Trevor Sykes explained, Christopher had no business partners at this time: he was completely on his own—except for his new romance with the ‘warm-hearted, effervescent’ Pixie.⁵² They soon set up home together and married in March 1979, when Christopher was 31 and she was 39. Sykes described Pixie as having ‘unquenchable vivacity’ and being ‘exceptionally intelligent’. According to him, they made a striking and elegant couple.⁵³ She began working with Christopher to build Qintex Ltd, which he then controlled. It was initially a family-run operation whose office was the living room of their home. Pixie was Christopher’s secretary, confidante and sounding board.⁵⁴ She attended the company’s annual general meetings and she and Christopher knew many of the shareholders personally, sharing a cup of tea with them after meetings.⁵⁵

As Pixie was well known in Melbourne business and social circles through her two previous marriages and was well connected with many key players in the city’s business elite, her age was clearly an asset for Christopher. While the Melbourne establishment was perhaps wary of a young, determined and largely inexperienced corporate raider, she oozed poise and maturity. Her long-time friend, restaurateur Brian Goldsmith, recalled that the word around Melbourne was that Pixie had the golden touch.⁵⁶ She soon became Christopher’s business partner, discussing strategies and ideas with him, adding stylish touches to his office and later to the Mirage resorts, and bringing her energy and determination to everything they did.⁵⁷ She was the key to Christopher winning acceptance by the Melbourne business community.

The dynamics of their relationship were complex. Pixie was clearly smitten with Christopher and he with her; friends and colleagues saw it as a very good marriage. She supported Christopher every step of the way and held his business acumen and ideas in high regard. In turn, he respected her intellect and knew the value of her unfailing support. They both worked extremely hard.⁵⁸ Christopher generally worked 12– 14-hour days, and had virtually no interests apart from work. Pixie juggled her intense commitment to Christopher both personally and professionally with her role as a mother of four daughters. Her youngest had recently started school while the older three were demanding teenagers who attended St Catherine’s, a prestigious private girls’ school in Toorak. The age dynamics in the family were unusual; her husband was only 10–12 years older than her teenagers and, while it is not clear whether he took on a fatherly role, he was nevertheless supportive and generous. It is also not clear what contact the girls had with their own fathers. Having had two previous failed marriages, Pixie was determined to make this one work. Her family observed that the couple were ‘so in love’.⁵⁹ Years later, Pixie recalled that they had had a ‘wonderful, passionate relationship and that their marriage was exhilarating’.⁶⁰ However, there were persistent rumours that Christopher was gay, which he dismissed on several occasions, including in his unpublished autobiography.⁶¹

With the strong support of his wife, Christopher’s career took off. Soon after gaining control of Qintex, he set his sights on buying underperforming jewellery businesses. The company took a stake in Lustre Jewellery before purchasing Hardy Brothers, a prestigious, 126-year-old luxury retailer at the top of the jewellery and gift market, for A$4.5 million. The acquisition was financed by Qintex selling its remaining holdings in VBN, and acquiring loans from Tricontinental Corporation, the merchant arm of the State Bank of Victoria, and the Commercial Bank of Australia. Christopher’s strategy was to build up a strong position in the jewellery sector to provide Qintex with a cash flow. But this was something of a mirage, as the cash flow was insufficient to service his interest bill.⁶² Nevertheless, the Skases were now being noticed and were acquiring the kind of power in financial circles that they both craved. As Christopher built Qintex and continued to buy underperforming companies, Pixie helped him gain acceptance and climb the social ladder.⁶³ Drawing on her networks in the business world, she created a critical role for herself as his empire’s publicist and event organiser. She knew about the world of entertaining from her first marriage to Argenti. And, living in Toorak during her second and third marriages, where her daughters attended school, brought her in to contact with wealthy parents who were part of Melbourne’s elite. She also got to know the interior designer Barry Peters, and florist to the rich and famous Kevin O’Neill.⁶⁴ Meanwhile, Christopher impressed bankers, financial institutions and corporate investors with Qintex’s remarkable growth and future potential.⁶⁵

The couple embraced the rapid social change that the 1970s had generated. The decade witnessed large protests for women’s rights, with Canberra hosting 700 women from across the country at a much-publicised women in politics conference in 1975 to mark International Women’s Year. There were also protests for migrant and gay rights. Deep divisions emerged in Australian society when the governor-general controversially sacked the Whitlam Labor government in November 1975 and the Liberal leader, Malcolm Fraser, went on to win the subsequent election. Despite such political upheaval, there was also a sense of optimism.⁶⁶ With change came the hope that opportunities might open up for young, confident entrepreneurs—in particular, that the old, established power networks in a deeply conservative city like Melbourne might be fractured. The stagnation of manufacturing in Victoria, and the Campbell Committee appointed by the federal Coalition government in 1979 to inquire into the Australian financial system, foreshadowed a clash of old and new networks and money in the city.⁶⁷ This would come to a head in the next decade when Robert Holmes à Court’s Bell Resources Ltd tried to get control of that most hallowed of Melbourne institutions, Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd, then Australia’s largest company.⁶⁸

Christopher and Pixie embodied this optimistic spirit and were determined to succeed. Initially financially prudent, Christopher did a personal balance sheet every Friday night.⁶⁹ He was still a young man in a hurry but, with Pixie’s unwavering support, he lost his youthful shyness and became much more assertive, telling interviewers that ‘you have got to give it a go … You are only here once’.⁷⁰ He worked nonstop. His only relaxation was swimming, and he would often hit the pool at 4.30 am before starting a gruelling round of meetings, interviews and travel.⁷¹ But he could only expand the Qintex empire by borrowing more and more money, thereby creating a mirage—an illusion—of financial success. Having developed a talent for making friends and impressing people, he used his growing power and influence to secure more funds. His ability to extract money from bankers, brokers and analysts by being attentive, friendly and reassuring was astonishing. One friend spoke of his ‘compelling personality and … absolute gift with words’.⁷² Yet, once bankers had agreed to provide finance for the next Qintex acquisition, he would hardly recognise them if he bumped into them in the street.⁷³ It was observed that, in acquiring power and influence, everything Christopher did had a meaning and purpose. Nothing was ever accidental; everything was planned.⁷⁴ This suggests a level of single-mindedness that bordered on ruthlessness. Constantly on the telephone or rushing off to meetings, he read about the stock market incessantly and made copious notes in a notebook that he always carried with him. A demanding boss, he expected his staff who were ‘forbidden to indulge in lunches’ to work hard all year round.⁷⁵ Soon, all Christopher’s and Pixie’s hard work and risk-taking began to pay off. They had a comfortable lifestyle, mostly financed by Qintex borrowing to buy ever more companies, such as Hardy Brothers, but also through Kahmea Investments, the personal company they had established and to which Qintex paid hefty management fees.

Within a year of their marriage, Pixie set about creating a new public persona for Christopher. She was aware that his market forays in the mid to late 1970s had generated hostility from Melbourne’s old boy network. They thought he was young and brash, and he despised them.⁷⁶ One of Qintex’s brokers described him as ‘too extravagant, too flamboyant and too much of a “high roller”’.⁷⁷ He did not fit the establishment mould and constantly made the point of stepping over the line. But Christopher and other young entrepreneurs like him had not been socialised into the comfortable Melbourne business elite (which by the 1970s was under threat) and challenged what were then accepted corporate practices. Pixie’s genius was in attracting top business and social figures to publicly endorse Christopher and Qintex at Qintex’s annual Christmas parties. These end-of-year events were meticulously choreographed and publicised, Pixie demonstrating her attention to detail and skill at knowing what would impress the carefully selected guests.

The first of these compelling annual spectacles was held in December 1980 when Christopher and Pixie hosted what one social columnist described as ‘the party of the season’ for 150 guests.⁷⁸ The venue was Lazars, a stylish restaurant featuring an Italianate courtyard adjacent to the elegant dining area, and all set within an historic bluestone building in King Street in the city. The party was brimming with bankers, businessmen, advertising gurus and other familiar faces and names from Melbourne’s top social set. Press accounts of the event emphasised that they were there to celebrate Qintex’s success, particularly the Hardy acquisition. Each guest received a present: for the women, there was a copy of the history of Hardy Brothers and for the men a bottle of vintage champagne. The signature features of the occasion—an up-market venue, superb food and wine, and quality gifts for each guest—were all Pixie’s personal touches. Having persuaded an influential list of guests to attend, she worked to ensure that they were likely to publicise Qintex and support the couple’s business ambitions. The subtext to the event was possibly more complex: it may have appeared to some as if Christopher and Pixie were thumbing their noses at the Melbourne establishment by demonstrating that key business figures were lending their patronage by attending the party and thus endorsing both them and Qintex. Their presence said: ‘You have arrived. You are okay. We support you.’ (The couple’s later decision to move Qintex’s operations to Brisbane can be read as clear evidence of the Skases’ disdain for the Melbourne establishment.⁷⁹)

And so, by 1980 Christopher and Pixie had created the mirage of the Qintex empire which was expanding fast. Qintex had purchased a classy jewellery business and was showing interest in further acquisitions, especially in the media and tourism industries. Over the course of the following decade, Qintex would not only acquire television stations, but also build high-quality tourist resorts and expand its operations to the United States, including a daring bid to acquire MGM/United Artists. However, underpinning the company’s meteoric rise was increasing amounts of debt.⁸⁰

The mirage was also personal. Christopher and Pixie were fascinated with acquiring and exercising power, and they worked hard to create a compelling image of themselves as an exciting and financially successful couple. He worked exceptionally hard at buying, carving up and selling companies. She worked just as hard at establishing and then continually embellishing the Skase brand. Constantly pictured in newspapers, they became the darlings of the media which was complicit in fuelling the mirage. This glistening mirage would sustain them throughout the 1980s as fortunes were made and lost in what was to be a heady and tumultuous decade in Australian business.

There is insufficient scope in this article to explore how the Skases fell out of favour with the Australian public—as well as financial institutions—at the end of the 1980s. Briefly, when Qintex collapsed, shareholders lost their money and financial institutions were owed staggering amounts of money. Tricontinental had lent substantial amounts to Qintex and Kahmea Investments, the Skases’ personal company, and the Skases had paid large management fees to Kahmea, which Sykes described as ‘immoral—but not illegal at the time’.⁸¹ Later, the royal commission investigating the collapse of Tricontinental criticised the performance of the institution’s management in lending to entrepreneurs such as Skase. It found that ‘Tricontinental’s management of credit risk failed at almost every turn’, and that some of its investment banking transactions gave rise to ‘deep suspicions of warehousing, insider trading, and failure to disclose relevant interests in substantial shareholdings’.⁸²

This is the image of the Skases that Australians remember. Hoyte concluded that Christopher, although charismatic, was ‘an arrogant and dictatorial leader who frequently made decisions without consultation, or who ignored advice he was given’, being guided by ‘a single-minded ambition and a clear opinion of how to achieve that ambition’.⁸³ This arrogance had its origins in Christopher’s interest in power. Even as a young journalist, he had craved power and approval from influential business figures. Then, in building his business empire, he developed a capacity for impressing financial institutions who were prepared to back him. Pixie was also interested in power. In her teenage years, she recalled, she had exercised it in a destructive manner. As an adult, she acquired power through developing extensive social networks and deftly using them to become an effective partner and support for both Christopher and Qintex.

By focusing on Christopher’s and Pixie’s family backgrounds, education and early careers, this article has tried to ‘go beyond the public surface’ of the couple.⁸⁴ It has examined how these formative influences shaped the compelling public personas they created during the mid to late 1970s, and their public partnership which was quite different from other entrepreneurial couples such as Alan and Eileen Bond and Robert and Janet Holmes à Court. This spotlight on the less well-known story of their lives has hopefully enabled them to come ‘to life so that the reader … can understand them’.⁸⁵ Their early scaffolding gave them both an interest in attaining and using power and fired their determination to gain acceptance from powerful financial and social elites. It also engendered the tenacity and single-mindedness, perhaps even arrogance, to embrace the opportunities that the 1980s afforded young entrepreneurs in Australia when financial institutions were willing—even desperate—to lend to them.⁸⁶

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1. 1 Kate White, ‘Australian Political Biography and Biographers: Revisiting Australian Political Biography’, Australian Journal of Biography and History 5 (2021): 13, doi.org/10.22459/AJBH.05.2021.01; Paul Barry, The Rise and Fall of Alan Bond (Sydney: Bantam Books, 1991); Paddy Manning, Boganaire: The Rise and Fall of Nathan Tinkler (Melbourne: Black Books Inc., 2013).

2. 2 Jennifer Petriglieri, Couples That Work (London: Penguin 2019).

3. 3 Nicholas Brown, ‘Public Lives, Private Lives: The Fundamental Dilemma in Political Biography’, in Australian Political Lives: Chronicling Political Careers and Administrative Histories, ed. T. Arkley, J. Nethercote and J. Wanna, 36 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), doi.org/10.22459/APL.10.2006.05.

4. 4 David Marr, ‘On Writing Non-Fiction’, The Garret Podcast, 29 November 2018.

5. 5 White, ‘Australian Political Biography’, 14.

6. 6 White, ‘Australian Political Biography’, 6. See also Judith Brett, ‘Recording Non-Labor Politics through Biography’, in Australian Political Lives: Chronicling Political Careers and Administrative Histories, ed. T. Arkley, J. Nethercote and J. Wanna, 25–8 (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006), doi.org/10.22459/APL.10.2006.03.

7. 7 Andrea Carson, ‘Australian Business Journalism: More Noise than Signal’, The Conversation, 20 May 2013, theconversation.com/australian-business-journalism-more-noise-than-signal-13996.

8. 8 Sue Smethurst, ‘Pixie Skase: I Feel Desperately Sorry’, Women’s Day, 30 June 2010.

9. 9 Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), 325.

10. 10 Greg Ansley, ‘Skase Again ‘Near Death’ as His Pursuers Close in’, New Zealand Herald, 19 January 2001.

11. 11 Tom Prior, Christopher Skase: Beyond the Mirage (Melbourne: Wilkinson Books, 1994), 59.

12. 12 Robert Murray and Kate White, ‘Staniforth Ricketson’, in Australian Financiers: Biographical Essays, ed. R. T. Appleyard and C. B. Schedvin, 309–30 (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1988).

13. 13 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 286.

14. 14 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 286.

15. 15 Prior, Christopher Skase, 59.

16. 16 Prior, Christopher Skase, 55.

17. 17 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 285.b.

18. 18 Prior, Christopher Skase, 63.

19. 19 Prior, Christopher Skase, 63–4.

20. 20 Prior, Christopher Skase, 72.

21. 21 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 285.

22. 22 Robert Murray, unpublished notes, 2022, Robert Murray personal papers.

23. 23 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 285.

24. 24 Prior, Christopher Skase, 64.

25. 25 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 287.

26. 26 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 286.

27. 27 For a description of the typical career path of a member of the Melbourne establishment, see Aaron Patrick, ‘ASIC Chairman James Shipton Is a Child of the Melbourne Establishment’, Australian Financial Review, 17 October 2017.

28. 28 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 288.

29. 29 See Sykes, The Bold Riders, 291, quoting Bruce Stannard, Bulletin, 14 May 1985.

30. 30 Kevin Childs, Age, 25 July 1987, 2.

31. 31 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 300.

32. 32 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 290–3.

33. 33 Prior, Christopher Skase, 21.

34. 34 Chris McConville, ‘Balwyn’, Encyclopedia of Melbourne, accessed 23 October 2025, www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00150b.htm.

35. 35 Prior, Christopher Skase, 23.

36. 36 Prior, Christopher Skase, 23.

37. 37 See Caroline Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, Age, 9 June 1991, 17.

38. 38 Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘Refractory Migrants: Fascist Surveillance on Italians in Australia 1922–1943’, Italian Historical Society Journal 15 (2007): 9–59.

39. 39 Age, 10 October 1993, 20.

40. 40 Trevor Sykes, ‘Timber Town Merger’, Australian Financial Review, 5 September 2003.

41. 41 Sykes, ‘Timber Town Merger’.

42. 42 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

43. 43 Sykes, ‘Timber Town Merger’.

44. 44 Jan O’Connell, ‘Lost Restaurants of Melbourne: Where and How We Ate in the 1950s’, Me and My Big Mouth, accessed 24 March 2025, meandmybigmouth.com.au/melbourne-restaurants-1950s/.

45. 45 H. M. Miller, Confessions of a Not-So-Secret Agent (Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2010).

46. 46 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

47. 47 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

48. 48 Sykes, ‘Timber Town Merger’.

49. 49 Harold Antony Larkins, Skase, Spain and Me (Sydney: Harold Antony Larkins, 2016), 83.

50. 50 Prior, Christopher Skase, 21.

51. 51 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

52. 52 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 293.

53. 53 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

54. 54 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

55. 55 Smethurst, ‘Pixie Skase’.

56. 56 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

57. 57 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

58. 58 Prior, Christopher Skase, 127–8.

59. 59 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

60. 60 Smethurst, ‘Pixie Skase’.

61. 61 See, for example, Russell Greening, ‘This Guy Was Really Good to the …’, Hot Copper, 13 December 2004, hotcopper.com.au/threads/this-guy-was-really-good-to-the.160982/; ‘Skase Plans His Comeback—After Half-Time’, Australian Financial Review, 22 April 1993, afr.com/politics/skase-plans-his-comeback-after-half-time-19930422-k5dp0.

62. 62 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 293–4.

63. 63 Lawrence van der Plaat, Too Good to be True: Inside the Corrupt World of Christopher Skase (Sydney: Macmillan 1996), 34.

64. 64 Wilson, ‘Whatever Happened to Pixie Skase’, 17.

65. 65 Prior, Christopher Skase, 21.

66. 66 Michelle Arrow, The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (Sydney: UNSW Publishing, 2019).

67. 67 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 472.

68. 68 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 413–17.

69. 69 Robert Gottliebsen and Ali Cromie, ‘Backs to the Wall’, Australian Financial Review, 27 October 1989.

70. 70 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

71. 71 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 304.

72. 72 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 326.

73. 73 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 326.

74. 74 Jenni Hewett, ‘On the Trail of a Recluse’, Australian Financial Review, 29 June 1990, afr.com/politics/on-the-trail-of-a-recluse-19900629-k3z36.

75. 75 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 306.

76. 76 Gottliebsen and Cromie, ‘Backs to the Wall’.

77. 77 Prior, Christopher Skase, 80.

78. 78 Prior, Christopher Skase, 83.

79. 79 Gottliebsen and Cromie, ‘Backs to the Wall’.

80. 80 Catherine Hoyte, ‘An Australian Mirage’ (PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2004), 352.

81. 81 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 325.

82. 82 Quoted in Yee-Fui Ng, ‘In the Moonlight? The Control and Accountability of Government Corporations in Australia’, Melbourne University Law Review 43, no. 1 (2019): 306.

83. 83 Hoyte, ‘An Australian Mirage’, 352–3.

84. 84 Brown, ‘Public Lives, Private Lives’, 36.

85. 85 JudithBrett, ‘Making Biography and History Come Alive’, The Garret Podcast, 24 April 2019.

86. 86 Sykes, The Bold Riders, 572.