Date with judge in family feud for Hancock millions

A mining magnate's fabulously wealthy only child sues his widow for $A44 million. Greg Ansley reports.

CANBERRA - Seven years ago, while the body of her late husband lay awaiting the outcome of a bitter contest for rights of internment, Rose Hancock was never in any doubt of her destiny.

"Rose Hancock will always be a great story, I know that," she said.

"Whether I am Mrs Hancock, or Mr Lacson or Mrs Smith the carpenter's wife, I will always be a good news story."

Now as the wife of wealthy Perth real estate agent William Porteous, and worth tens of millions of dollars in her own right, she has for the past three weeks been absorbing Australia in the fulfilment of her mourning prophesy.

When her former husband, mining pioneer Lang Hancock, died in 1992 he left control of his vast empire and of royalties of more than $A15 million ($17.73 million) a year to his daughter, Gina Rinehart, through Hancock Prospecting, plus other immensely rich assets.

Rose also became fabulously wealthy: an audit of her fortune in 1990, presented to the Supreme Court in Perth this week, listed assets worth $60.7 million, including more than $9 million in cash and bonds, $3 million in jewellery and about $46.5 million in property.

Gina is now suing Rose for the return of $20 million of property held in Sydney, Florida and Perth - including her vast mansion Prix d'Armour - and $24 million in accrued interest.

Her claim is that Rose nagged her husband into plundering Hancock Prospecting. Rose denies the suit.

Lang Hancock came out of Australian mythology, a boy from the impossibly remote Pilbara region of northern Western Australia who grew up with Aborigines and the bush ballads of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson, and who in 1952 discovered the world's richest iron-ore deposit.

He was a man of iron views: a non-smoking teetotaller who shunned publicity. An admirer of the executed former Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, he wanted to blast his way to mineral deposits with nuclear bombs and advocated the sterilisation of mixed-race Aborigines.

His first marriage was short and unhappy; his second, to Hope Nicholas, was a long and happy union which produced Gina.

Gina later joined the company as an astute and active executive.

But life changed dramatically in 1983: Hope died of cancer, Gina married for the second time, to American lawyer Frank Rinehart - and Rose appeared like a bombshell.

When she entered the Hancocks' lives as a maid she was already married to two men and was preparing to marry a third - heroin addict Andres Michiesen, who died of an overdose in 1987 - to gain Australian citizenship.

Instead, in short order, Rose became Hancock's wife and ignited her furious and undiminished feud with Gina.

Hancock's life changed completely, turned round by a wife whose exhausting efforts to break into Perth's rigidly exclusive upper crust involved him in a seemingly endless and public social whirl.

According to Gina's testimony to the Supreme Court, Rose was within three years haranguing Hancock unmercifully for money to build Prix d'Armour.

Gina claims that as the years passed she became more alarmed by the woman she described - to Rose's continuing fury - as a "Filipina prostitute." She warned her father in a 1992 letter that the money he was siphoning from Hancock

Prospecting was a breach of fiduciary duty, and that he risked criminal prosecution and loss of control of the firm if he continued.

As Hancock's health failed, Gina said, the pressures mounted and her father had told her, "I cannot find a way out."

Rose counter-claims that Hancock feared Gina was plotting to take over control of Hancock Prospecting by having him declared senile and incapable of running the company, and that he regretted creating a "monster for his back" by appointing his daughter a director.

Rose also denies using her position as a director of Hancock Prospecting to persuade her husband to strip funds from it through a series of sham transactions.

"I was the queen of the house and Lang was the beginning and end of Hancock Prospecting."

But life in Prix d'Armour was falling to pieces as Hancock neared death in 1992.

Rose was ordered abroad to beat her pethedine addiction and there were rumours of an association with Hancock's real estate friend William Porteous - later to become her husband. Rose's daughter, Johanna, was cut from the will because of an alleged fraud, and an acrimonious split between Johanna and Rose was aired on a tell-all appearance on 60 Minutes.

As a final deathbed act, Hancock took out a restraining order preventing Rose from seeing him.

Within hours of his death, police were investigating claims that he had been murdered. Hancock's body was in limbo, caught between competing claims by Gina and Rose for rights of burial, solved later by separate memorial services.

Eight years later, Hancock is probably still turning in his grave.