Pamela G. Hollie, “The ‘Richest Man’ in Australia,” The New York Times, December 12, 1982, p. 8, sec. 3 (reporting from Perth).

Lang Hancock made a bundle in iron ore. Now, at 73, he has a new plan to get richer.

Langley George Hancock must have seen the documentary Dig a Million, Make a Million at least 100 times since it was made in the late 1960’s. It stars a much younger, stockier Lang Hancock as himself, a tough-talking Australian prospector; the late Tom Price, the right-hand man of the late industrialist Henry Kaiser, as the prospector’s American sidekick, and A.W. Clausen, then a Bank of America vice president, as the banker who helps the prospector and Kaiser Steel strike a deal to explore and mine the prospector’s iron ore El Dorado in the Hamersley Range. The film ends happily with the prospector flying off into the Australian sunset.

Mr Hancock has reason to get great satisfaction from the film. It depicts his home state of Western Australia as Australia’s Texas, a state of open spaces, mineral wealth and unlimited opportunity. It shows an independent, resourceful and unorthodox Lang Hancock demonstrating the John Wayne-like qualities that have made him a business legend in Australia. And it is a testament, in somewhat faded hues, to the legend of the “lucky country,” which holds that people who live here are lucky. Mr Hancock has reason to believe in that luck.

In November 1952, Lang Hancock was piloting a small plane from asbestos mines in the north to Perth when a storm forced him to fly low over the Hamersley Range in central Western Australia. “Flying low, I followed the gorge,” he remembered. “I noticed the walls. They were made of iron ore, but I figured it had to be poor grade. At the time, they said Australia didn’t have any grade iron ore,” he said. “I followed the iron ore in the walls for 70 miles.”

Now Lang Hancock is said to be Australia’s richest man. His personal trust company is the holder of mining titles, by act of the state parliament of Western Australia government, that are said to contain more high-grade ore than the total high-grade reserves of the United State and Canada combined. When the ore is extracted, Mr Hancock and his 28-year-old daughter, who is taking over the company from her father, get 2.5 percent royalties on every spadeful.

“The total reserves of the Hamersley iron field are 400 percent more valuable than the total calculated reserves” of oil in the Middle East, Mr Hancock said.

Because the actual value of Hamersley ore deposits has never been proven and Mr Hancock’s company, Hancock Prospecting, is privately held an all of his assets are in his personal trust, many of his claims go unchallenged. But Government projections estimate that there is enough iron ore in Western Australia to supply Australia, Japan and possibly many other world markets well into the 21st Century. “If the reserves are handled properly, Australia can be prosperous for decades,” said Mr Hancock, who is convinced that his development plans for Australia will guarantee that the “lucky country” retains its reputation.

At 73, Mr Hancock is planning the crowning achievement of his career: the building of two $1 billion projects. When completed, he says, they will free Australia from its economic reliance on Japan, open up its vast resources to exploration and of course, raise the extraction from ore mines where Mr Hancock gets a royalty.

The two projects call for the building of a railroad and deep-water port in the state of Western Australia for iron ore, and another railroad and deep-water port in the state of Queensland on the east coast for the export of steam coal. In time, he sees a link between the two states, a transcontinental railway to haul iron ore from the west to a steel mill in the east.

There are snags, of course. The fizzling of the Australian resources boom during the world recession has made the state government of Western Australia dubious about Mr Hancock’s grand ideas. Mr Hancock’s response to what he sees as government foot-dragging has been to initiate a one-man secessionist movement.

Because Western Australians generally feel that the riches of the west end up supporting businessmen in the east, Mr Hancock’s campaign is not considered eccentric here. In fact, Mr Hancock wins many supporters whenever he cranks up his campaign in response to one politician or another irking him.

“Government represents the blind leading the mentally decrepit,” he says. “Western Australia has the potential to be the richest place on earth, but it will not reach its potential while it remains part of the Australian federation under the present constitution,” he says.

Now he thinks he is on his way to succeeding in his two projects. Finsider, a holding company of the Italian state-owned steel and engineering group, I.R.I., has indicated that it is willing to finance the project and may form a consortium with two other Italian companies, Finmeccanica and Impresit, which would accept iron ore as partial payment for their investment.

He sees the area as the Ruhr of Australia. He is further encouraged in his plans by the support of the Queensland government under its premier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. Queensland apparently is eager to proceed with its portion of the project. “We should have begun long ago,” the premier told newsmen recently.

Talk of creating an Australian Ruhr, however, has not been popular in Australia, particularly among the environmentalists, aboriginal land rights advocates and public interest groups who stand in the way of Mr Hancock’s projects. “If people really realised what proper use of resources could bring in terms of employment and prosperity, I think we would have fewer problems,” said Gina Hayward, Mr Hancock’s daughter and business partner. To educate Australia, Mrs Hayward decided to ferry diplomats, businessmen and community leaders around Australia’s major mineral sites so that they could see the techniques of mining, environmental control and safety. She called it Wage Up Australia. “My father and I are convinced that Australia’s future lies solely in economic strength through the correct use of our mineral and energy resources,” she said.

Mr Hancock’s dream of national projects as well as his views about business and government have been adopted by his daughter, who is the heir apparent to the Hancock empire. When her father opens his office door, he looks directly into her office opposite his. “My father and I are very close,” said Mrs Hayward, the Hancock’s only child. Her mother, according to Mrs Hayward, had in the past traveled on business with Mr Hancock, but she is now too ill to do so. Mr Hancock continues his activity despite a heart condition.

From the time she was 12, Gina Hayward has been at her father’s side. She has traveled with him to promote the sale of iron ore around the world. She has met with heads of state and learned first hand the tactics that earned her father his nickname, “the bull” — his refusal to take “no” for an answer and his bull-headedness. When she felt he needed her, she dropped out of college to be his partner and confidante. Now that he has had to take it easy after a heart attack, Mrs Hayward, a divorced mother of two, began to take over the prospecting company.

Unlike her father, she is very soft spoken, almost shy, but like her father she is very folksy and unpretentious. Though she envisions a time when Hancock Prospecting will go public in order to raise money for exploration, she doesn’t anticipate that the company will ever be large. Right now, the company is very small, essentially her, her father and a small office staff on the second floor of a modest building that has a “for lease” sign posted on the front lawn.

The Hancocks don’t flaunt their wealth. Mr. Hancock’s only extravagance is his jet, a Learjet that he uses to shuttle between appointments in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. When he is in Perth, he usually spends his time at the office, sitting among his secession campaign literature, writing his own letters and proposals. The man who is said to be the richest man in Australia uses an ordinary ballpoint pen and wears white socks with his black shoes.