Mourners gather to pay their respects to high-profile businessman James Strong, who died last week. Source: AAP
JAMES Strong was a bow-tie bikie who lived life at full throttle.
Hundreds of high-profile Australians from the boardroom to the race track to the stage gathered on Monday to remember Mr Strong as an astute businessman, generous philanthropist, arts lover and sports tragic.
The 68-year-old former Qantas chief and Woolworths chairman died on March 3 from lung complications following surgery.
The mourners at Sydney's City Recital Hall included NSW Governor Marie Bashir, Labor MP and musician Peter Garrett, former Reserve Bank of Australia chairman Ian McFarlane and former director of the Art Gallery of NSW Edmund Capon.
Former motorcycle World Champion Mick Doohan told the service that he first met Mr Strong at Eastern Creek Raceway in the mid 1990s and the pair soon became firm friends over a shared love of the sport.
"He lived life at full throttle and he was the only bow tie bikie I knew," Doohan said.
His son Sam Strong said his father, who grew up on a farm in Lismore, was a great listener and a voracious reader who had a particular love of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
"There was more than a little of a poet trapped inside a businessman's body," he said.
He said he and his brother Nick could not recall their father ever raising his voice and he was a fiercely attentive listener who always made time for them.
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce paid tribute to Mr Strong's work in transforming the airline during the 1990s.
"With the airline heading into its biggest transformation since it was founded in 1920, this was the hardest job in aviation, and one of the toughest in corporate Australia," he said.
"How James succeeded was a lesson in leadership."
Mr Joyce said he also valued Mr Strong's insight when he returned to Qantas as a director in 2006.
"He was a true gentleman but also a fighter; an opera buff and a rev-head; mountain climber and bookworm: businessman and dreamer," he said.
"He was both tough and smooth and always a class act."
Woolworths chief executive Grant O'Brien said the supermarket giant would be passing on Mr Strong's words of advice on listening, treating people equally and acting with grace and dignity to its future recruits.
"I though Woolworths bought out the best in James because it was a way for him to connect with thousands of Australians," he said.
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