Rinehart believes the mining gospel that she preaches. She believes that she and her fellow-billionaires know best. Illustration by Gregory Manchess

Australia, thanks largely to the economic rise of China, has been in the throes of a mining boom. The “lucky country,” as it is called, has enormous deposits of the high-grade iron ore required by the steel mills of Asia. In Western Australia, where most of the iron ore resides, the boom has created unprecedented prosperity, along with a small tribe of billionaires. Georgina (Gina) Hope Rinehart, who owns a company called Hancock Prospecting and has recently been buying up Australian media properties, is the best known of these new tycoons. According to BRW, a weekly business magazine, Gina Rinehart became the richest woman in Australia in 2010, the richest person in Australia in 2011, and the richest woman in the world in 2012, with an estimated net worth of nearly thirty billion dollars. Rinehart, who lives in Perth—the state capital of Western Australia—is fifty-eight, a widow, and a mother of four. She shuns the press and rarely appears in public. She is sensitive, however, to the media treatment she receives, which is voluminous—she qualifies, by sheer quantity of ink, airtime, Web sites, pop songs, and pub conversation devoted to her, as a national obsession—and often rough. Two things seem to hurt her particularly: the stock news description of her as an heiress, and perceived failures of the press to acknowledge the achievements of her late father, Lang Hancock, whom she adored (when they were not feuding) with a rare intensity.

Lang Hancock was a piece of work. He started out as a rancher, asbestos miner, and prospector in the Pilbara, a vast sweltering wilderness in northwest Australia. (It is pronounced as two syllables: Pilbra.) In November, 1952, according to legend, he was flying in a flimsy little Auster aircraft with his wife, Hope, over the Hamersley Range, an extra-remote fastness in the Pilbara. A storm arose. Unable to climb through the clouds, they threaded narrow gorges in lashing rain. Hancock, an expert bush pilot, managed to note the rust color, brought out by the rain, of the gorge walls, which, as he later told Australian television, “showed it to me to be oxidized iron.” He returned to the spot in better weather and started laying the foundation of a mining fortune. He did this not by mining but by prospecting, along with an associate named Ken McCamey, and by tirelessly lobbying the state and federal governments to repeal an embargo on the export of iron ore and a ban on the pegging of claims. When the repeals finally came, in the early nineteen-sixties, Hancock staked his claims and, after more rounds of badgering, persuaded mining executives from Britain and the United States to invest in the Pilbara. His royalty agreement with Rio Tinto, a London-based multinational, soon made him a multimillionaire. The big customer in those days was Japan.

Unlike his daughter, Hancock actively engaged the press. He told his story to any reporter who would listen. He even started two newspapers, as megaphones for his political views. He was an ardent Western Australia secessionist. Historically a poor, backward, isolated state—Robert Hughes described it, in “The Fatal Shore,” as “a colony with a body the size of Europe and the brain of an infant”—Western Australia could become, with its new mining wealth, Hancock believed, a paradise of free enterprise if it could only escape the stifling grasp of the eastern establishment in Sydney and Melbourne. Hancock wanted to use nuclear weapons for mining and for dredging new ports along the northwest coast, but there was no bloody chance of getting such bold ideas approved by the timid federal bureaucracy, in Canberra. He didn’t fear radioactive fallout any more than he believed asbestos exposure caused asbestosis or the cancer mesothelioma. The blue-asbestos mine that Hancock ran in the nineteen-thirties and forties at Wittenoom is thought to have caused hundreds of asbestos-related deaths, many of them among its largely Aboriginal workforce, but Hancock never accepted the medical connection, let alone responsibility. He held an extreme version of a common attitude among white Australians of his generation toward native people. He once told a television interviewer that the “problem” of “half-castes” could be solved by luring people to a central welfare office, to “dope” their water in order to sterilize them and thus wipe out the race.

Gina was Lang and Hope Hancock’s only child. Lang had expected a boy, whom he planned to name George, for his father. He took to calling Georgina “young fella” or “my right-hand man.” He and Gina were exceptionally close. When she was small, they lived in the Pilbara, forty miles north of Wittenoom. On Saturdays, they flew six hundred miles to buy groceries. After Hope developed breast cancer, the family moved to Perth to be near a good hospital. Gina boarded at a girls’ school, where her fellow-students remember Lang sometimes coming in a Rolls-Royce to spend the afternoons talking with his daughter in his car. When the BBC made “Man of Iron,” a documentary about Lang, in 1966, a film crew went to the school to interview twelve-year-old Gina. “I think my father is nearly perfect,” she said. “I think he’s quite handsome, except a bit fat.”

Hancock’s obsession with mining and the Pilbara—for decades, he struggled, in vain, to find backers to develop his own iron-ore mine—was transferred intact to his daughter. He took her with him, even as a child, to business meetings all over the globe, to the bemusement of bankers and sheikhs. Tim Winton, the Western Australian novelist, says that Gina’s childhood seemed to be a “science experiment,” conducted inside a “regal bubble.” When she was old enough to drive, Lang is said to have had ten new cars brought to her school for her to choose among. One of Lang’s biographers, Robert Duffield, having been commissioned to write a newspaper article on Gina, then twenty-two, as the “richest girl in Australia,” found her interested only in minerals. Gina “tries to be nice to everybody,” Duffield wrote. But “if they disappoint her, or annoy her, or in any way seem to threaten her, the friendly filter on the opal-clear eyes drops to reveal a more steely blue.” While Gina was still in her teens, her famously gruff father said, “She’s a lot tougher than me.” Gina went to the University of Sydney but lasted only a year. She objected to the lectures of a left-wing economics professor, found she had nothing in common with her classmates, and returned to Perth and her life’s mission in what she called, with deadly earnestness, the House of Hancock.

But Gina and her father began to clash. She married twice, and had two children with each husband. The first was a young employee of the family firm, whom Gina soon divorced. The second was an American lawyer, Frank Rinehart. He was thirty-seven years older than Gina. According to “Gina Rinehart: The Untold Story of the Richest Woman in the World,” a new biography by Adele Ferguson, Frank had been convicted of tax fraud in the U.S. and disbarred. Lang thought that he had his eye on Hancock Prospecting. After Hope Hancock died, in 1983, and Gina chose to contest her mother’s will, Lang saw Frank Rinehart’s hand behind the effort and was enraged. Worse, from Gina’s point of view, her father took up with Rose Lacson, a young housekeeper from the Philippines whom Gina had hired. The Rineharts tried to get Lacson deported. In an exchange of letters between father and daughter that later surfaced in court, Gina told Lang that he had become a laughingstock. Lang bitterly asked Gina to “allow me to remember you as the neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady” that she had been, rather than “the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become.” She was “grossly overweight,” he wrote. “I am glad your mother cannot see you now.” Hancock married Lacson and built her a white-pillared water-view mansion called Prix d’Amour. They went on a round-the-world honeymoon in his Learjet. Gina saw her inheritance being frittered away. Meanwhile, her father hurled himself into a series of ill-advised business ventures, including a failed barter deal with Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania.