Career
He began his career as a stockbroker, but soon became a finance journalist instead, working at The Sun News-Pictorial. In 1975 he purchased Qintex, a small Tasmanian company.
Skase slowly developed Qintex and, over several years, turned it into one of Australia's larger corporations. By the late 1980s, the Qintex group was worth A$1.5 billion. Skase owned five resorts as well as interests in the Seven Network television station and the Brisbane Bears VFL club. On the eve of the 1990 economic recession, his two "Mirage" resorts in Port Douglas, Queensland were among the largest in the country and Skase played a key role in putting the formerly small town on the international tourist map.
Skase became known for his displays of wealth, with a lavish 40th birthday party in 1988, and a company Christmas party that cost $450,000. In one particular incident, he had his private jet fly from Port Douglas to Melbourne to pick up a dress for his wife, Pixie.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Skase
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)