At Gina Rinehart’s childhood home of Mulga Downs, only relics remain of the working homestead that is at the heart of the Hancock family’s foundation story. Cattle and sheep pens sit abandoned as rust and weeds slowly take over the station’s old outbuildings.
The vast outback property – almost a million acres in size – is talked about nostalgically by Australia’s richest person. It was here that she roamed free as a child, climbing windmills to help her father, Lang Hancock, on the farm, and sweeping the Pilbara’s ubiquitous red dust from the kitchen floor.
