Mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s produces inspirational autobiography

Pakistan News & Features Services

Australia’s mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, one of the world's wealthiest people, followed her illustrious father's footsteps on a second front with the launch a book of political essays titled ‘Northern Australia, and Then Some-Changes We Need to Make Our Country Rich’ on November 22. The launch events were held in Sydney and Brisbane besides Perth. 

The date was significant for the Rinehart family as it coincided with the 60th anniversary of Lang Hancock's flight over the Pilbara, when the prospector discovered some of the iron ore deposits that form the basis of the family's vast wealth. 

For hours at the book launch, giant movie screens rained down recurring grainy images of a younger Rinehart courting politicians and business people in 1979 aboard a chartered Qantas 747 dubbed Wake up Australia. 

The 58-year-old widow with a fortune estimated by Forbes at US$18 billion ($22 billion) preferred to play it safe at the launch where she was surrounded herself with hundreds of supporters mostly from the mining fraternity, where she is revered for transforming her late father's debt-ridden iron ore business into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. 

A long queue of people stood just to get hold of at least one book to have it signed by the author, the wealthiest woman in the world, and Australia's most successful entrepreneur. 

Her book ‘Northern Australia, and Then Some-Changes We Need to Make Our Country Rich’ is a collection of essays, speeches, and poems, calls on politicians, environmentalists and the public to support Australia's miners, the nation's main growth engine, or face the consequences of economic decline. It is spread over 220 pages. 

Rinehart's poetry in the book reinforces the message, in one verse she wrote: "Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled. Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world." 

 "We don't want to see Australia continue on a course with too many heads buried in the sand, critical investors discouraged by bad policies, or even hated, with too few understanding the problems while Australia moves towards being another Greece, Spain or Portugal,” she concluded.