Gina Rinehart is very rich — and very Australian. The mining magnate’s ancestors immigrated to the country’s hardscrabble western reaches in the 1830s. A mountain range there is named after her family. In public she sometimes adopts a characteristically Australian distaste for pretension — what one historian called the country’s “democracy of manners” — such as the time she climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck with a bullhorn to excoriate a mining tax. On Friday Ms. Rinehart added further to her local bona fides as she became the sole remaining bidder for iconic Australian grazing land bigger than Portugal. But her apparent victory will probably add to unease among some Australian leaders over a major foreign buyer: Her partners in the bid are from China. Read more
