That there is no one yet bleeding on the ground from a battle-axe to the head does not detract from the entertainment value of the family’s skirmishes, given what it reveals about the dark similarities of all families, as well as the unique realities of very rich people.
The Hancock-Rinehart family story has the theatrical advantage over the sagas of middle Australia because their wealth buys their drama bigger props. Their now-dead patriarch, Lang Hancock, was already from a rich landowning Western Australian family when he discovered the world’s largest iron ore deposit in the Pilbara in 1952. With the discovery came enough ready cash for messy questions about Hancock’s child with an Aboriginal woman to be raised, and huge sums to be donated to the campaigns of right-wing politicians like Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It also provided him the platform to call for the censorship of work by Ralph Nader and John Kenneth Galbraith, lest their ideas wreck an Australia in which he believed “the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist."His second marriage produced his only acknowledged daughter, Gina – and within a year of Gina’s mother’s death, Hancock married his maid, Rose Porteous. As the granddaughter of a famous Filipino general, it really was Porteous’ extraordinary good fortune to meet an amorous billionaire within the three months she spent slumming it as a domestic on a temporary work visa. She was 39 years his junior, and the deterioration of their relationship in the months before Hancock’s death impelled Rinehart into a series of court actions to contest whether Porteous had nagged Hancock towards mortality. Porteous was exonerated from any role in Hancock’s death after years of legal agitation by Rinehart concluded only with a coronial inquest in 2001.
So far, so much like a vintage episode of Dynasty that everyone can enjoy. Porteous, in her 1980s heyday, certainly rocked very similar frocks to Joan Collins at her best.
As Hancock’s only acknowledged child, Gina inherited control of 75% of Hancock Prospecting. What is at present in dispute is a remaining percentage of the fortune left by her father in a trust for her four children. Rinehart is the trustee of her children’s stake, but, as the stake remains unvested, three of the four children are now battling their mother in court for delivery of their share. There are media gag orders, suppression statements and ongoing redistributions of power and alliance.
On an internal and familiar level, of course, this is not an episode of Dynasty – it’s a family implosion that must be enormously upsetting for the claimants. Let me assure the Rinehart-Hancocks that while their problems may be those occupying the public eye, when it comes to money and disputes over inheritance, few Australian families are spared the specific psychosis of greed and retribution that accompanies competitive claims of family members in the posthumous legal carve-up. Even my own humble clan spent years memorising the detail of the Family Provision Act (1995) when the modest bequest of my grandmother to my mother, her carer, was contested by family members. Having gone though the process in which the intimacies of family relationships are spread as if on the slab at a scalpel party run by hemophiliac vampires, my heart goes out to anyone feeling that specific sharp stab – Hancock’s offspring or not.
But the Hancock-Rineharts feud also is about a symbolic corporate institution indulging some inner thumbwrestling while it continues to profit from this country’s enduring Indigenous shame. Some people would consider, perhaps, that the iron ore wealth fought over by the Hancock-Rinehart family is actually that of the minelands’ traditional owners, the Martidja Banyjima people. Hancock could stake his mining claim there in 1952 because he was white, they were black and had no land rights under the flora and fauna act.
Consider also that the mineral wealth of Hancock claims is not a wealth the family cares to share with the nation that provided their lease to mine there. The former Labor government fought a doomed campaign to at least tax the superprofits of the family business in order to redress the financial stake of the nation. Rinehart, who always opposed carbon and mining taxes, responded as only a billionaire can or would, by purchasing media interests like Fairfax and the Ten Network – although Fairfax fought her desire to editorially control its publications.
And while Rinehart has been claiming that she’s only fighting her children to protect her family’s $4bn trust from capital gains tax, her respect for the incomes of other families has not been so high. Despite enjoying an estimated personal wealth of more than $18bn, only last year Gina Rinehart commented that “Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than two dollars a day”.
While following the latest events in the court proceedings as one would a Dallas boxed-set on a wet weekend, there can exist a temptation to pity the Hancock-Rineharts. It’s easy to mutter “all that money and they can’t buy happiness”, and to explain away Rinehart’s anti-tax campaign as a sad symptom of growing up in her family.
Yep, I’m sure it sucked … but turn off the sympathy taps, Australia. Save your tears for an actual soap opera.
