John Hancock has barely spoken to his mother in more than two decades.
But on Wednesday, Hancock offered up an olive branch to Australia’s richest woman, his mother, Gina Rinehart.
At the denouement of an epic Western Australian Supreme Court case which became a titanic battle between two of the state’s richest mining clans, and another gash in the relationship between Rinehart and her eldest children, Hancock announced that he wanted “to focus on the positive,” and find a way forward for the divided family.
“My primary focus for the next 21 days is an attempt at that reunification, and a return to the close family we had at various times in the last 50 years of my life,” he said.
“I hope we can finally put these events from decades ago behind us, and as a united family, celebrate and continue the contribution we have made to Australia.”
Central to the case is who gets what from the multibillion-dollar legacy of Rinehart’s father, Lang Hancock, and his business partner Peter Wright, who pioneered one of the most lucrative mining regions in the world.
Amid the Wright-Rinehart dispute, John Hancock and his younger sister Bianca Hancock were joined to the case, with the pair arguing that they should have inherited the multibillion-dollar Hope Downs site under a trust set up for them by Lang before his death. That trust has been the source of the bitter and ongoing feud between Rinehart and her two eldest children.
On Wednesday, after 13 years, three judges, 51 days of court hearings and more than $100 million in legal fees, Justice Jennifer Smith handed down a decision that she deemed “a half-win” both for Wright’s descendants and Rinehart.
Bianca and John, on the other hand, got nothing. Their claims are still subject to ongoing arbitration with their mother.
In a lengthy statement that followed the judgment, Hancock Prospecting executive director Jay Newby did not sound like his ultimate boss was in a mood to accept the olive branch offered up by her son.
“Justice Smith’s decision, which rejected John and Bianca’s ownership claims over the Hope Downs and East Angelas tenements, demonstrates that the assertions contained in the extracts below from earlier media reports, including wrongful assertions of fraud in relation to the ownership of Hope Downs and East Angelas, are plainly wrong,” he said.
Newby’s statement ran through a list of claims made by John and Bianca which he termed “abusive and sensationalist,” many of which had been raised by the pair’s lawyers during the lengthy trial and were reported by the media.
The statement, which appeared more occupied with John and Bianca than the headline claim brought by the Wright’s family company, appears to slam the door on Hancock’s hopes of a rapprochement.
The seeds of the dispute were sowed decades ago, during Hancock’s life.
Legend has it that in 1952, Lang Hancock was flying across the Pilbara when bad weather forced him to navigate his plane low through the gorges on the Turner River, where he found himself in the midst of the world’s largest iron ore deposit.
Hancock later enlisted his old school friend Peter Wright to help develop the site. By the 1980s, as both men ailed, Hancock was determined to cut a deal for the spoils with Wright, writing in an eerily prescient letter that he hoped to avoid “a mess which could result in lawyers getting a large share of the pickings”.
Decades later, Justice Smith would rule that a deal signed between Hancock and Wright would give the latter’s heirs, including his reclusive billionaire daughter Angela Bennett, 50 per cent of past and future royalties on some of the Hope Downs mines.
Smith’s judgment has become a kind of Rorschach test for all parties to the dispute. But the bigger, unambiguous picture from the decades of litigation is this: that Gina Rinehart, despite her extraordinary wealth, and incredible largesse towards favoured political, philanthropic and sporting causes, has a strained relationship with her closest blood relations.
(She is, however, supported by her two younger daughters, Hope and Ginia.)
Despite Gina projecting herself as the guardian of Lang Hancock’s legacy, Wednesday’s judgment provided more evidence of just how strained relations between father and daughter were in the final decade of his life, described as “bitter” and “in furious dispute” by Smith.
At the heart of that souring was Hancock’s 1985 marriage to his former maid, Rose Porteous, a Filipino woman 39 years his junior, who Rinehart would later disparage as an “oriental concubine,” and try (unsuccessfully) to get deported.
During the trial, Rinehart’s barrister, Noel Hutley, SC, claimed that Hancock had breached director’s duties by siphoning money away from his company to fund his and Porteous’ lavish lifestyle, an argument ultimately accepted by Smith in a judgment that at times damned the family patriarch’s conduct during his winter years.
“Large distributions of money had been made from [Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd] to Lang Hancock and Rose Porteous to fund their lifestyle,” she said, noting that Hancock had sought to keep Rinehart in the dark about the state of the company’s finances. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Porteous.
In his statement, John Hancock called the findings made about his grandfather “a bitter pill to swallow”.
“I know he was not perfect but for more than three decades, I have defended his legacy where appropriate – there is nobody left to do so.”
Hancock’s hopes of a detente with his mother appear scorched by her company’s statement.
Smith concluded that his and Bianca’s claims that they had an interest in Hope Downs under the trust created by Hancock must “fail at the first hurdle”.
But their fight with Rinehart over their inheritance, ongoing for 15 years, will be resolved by arbitration, following a 2019 High Court decision which accepted Gina Rinehart’s desire to keep that matter private.
Enough of the family’s bad blood has already been spilled in public.
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Kishor Napier-Raman is a senior business writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Previously he worked as a CBD columnist and reporter in the federal parliamentary press gallery.Connect via X or email.
