"I'll take a 50-50 gamble on anything," Bryce Courtenay told Jane Cadzow in March, when discussing the likelihood his cancer would return within two years. The 79-year-old author died on November 22. A week later, Cadzow won the Walkley Award for magazine feature writing for this article in Good Weekend.

Bryce Courtenay is in remarkably good spirits for a person in his predicament. "This might be the last interview ever," he says, with what can only be described as a devil-may-care laugh. It is more than a year since Australia's top-selling novelist was diagnosed with stage three stomach cancer. As he points out, "Stage four is it." But the author of such blockbusters as Tandia and The Potato Factory sees little sense in wasting time worrying about his future, or lack of it. Since recovering from surgery to remove the tumours, he has been hard at work on his latest sprawling epic, putting in 12-hour shifts at his desk and tapping out thousands of words a day. Post-operative chemotherapy and radiation therapy were recommended, he says, but he was told they would only slightly improve his prognosis and he figured the side effects would play havoc with his writing schedule. He prefers to take his chances without them.

So far, so good. His 21st book is coming along nicely and Courtenay looks as healthy and spry as any 78-year-old has a right to look. His cheeks are pink, his mood is buoyant. "May I have a hug?" he asks when I arrive at his comfortable house in a leafy inner suburb of Canberra.

Courtenay is not only this country's most popular purveyor of fiction - a more or less permanent fixture on our best-seller lists - but one of our best-loved citizens. A small man with a big personality, he is a Member of the Order of Australia, an Australia Day ambassador and both sponsor and presenter of the annual Australian Hero Award. As a public speaker, he is so inspirational that he has been known to move even himself to tears. But as he wraps me in his arms, I am uncomfortably aware that there are some strange inconsistencies in his life story.

Have you fudged facts? There is no nice way of asking that. But as it turns out, Courtenay admits freely to a tendency to tinker with the truth. He says he doesn't mean to mislead, exactly. "It's just how it comes out. Sometimes it's absurd, sometimes it's ridiculous, often it's laughable. And sometimes it's very close to being a lie."

Listening to the conversation is his second wife and former publicist, Christine Gee. "Not a lie, darling," she corrects him. "No, you don't tell lies. Lying isn't a nice thing to do."

Gee, 57, turns to me: "I don't see Bryce as someone who lies. I see him as someone who will embellish a story for effect, but he will never deliberately tell a lie to hurt someone, to win a point or anything like that."

Courtenay agrees. "I never do it to gain anything," he says. "No way."

Hundreds of articles have been written about Courtenay since the 1989 release of his smash-hit debut novel, The Power of One, said to be based on his own harrowing childhood in South Africa. Trawling through the archives before we meet, I read about his early years in a brutal orphanage, his banishment from the land of his birth as a result of his efforts to help the oppressed black majority, his emergence as an advertising whiz-kid in Australia and his eventual transformation into a sensationally successful author. There is much about his despair over his son's death from medically acquired AIDS (the subject of a poignant non-fiction book, April Fool's Day), his struggle to forgive critics who dismiss his novels as potboilers and the solace he has found in long- distance running. If you were writing the back-cover blurb for his biography, you would use phrases like "epic tale of adversity and triumph" and "spellbinding testament to the strength of the human spirit".

Flicking through the newspaper files, my eye is caught by a snippet about Courtenay competing in the 1996 Boston marathon. According to the report, he realised 35 kilometres into the race that he wasn't as fit as he should have been. Deciding the best tactic was to hook up with another runner, he fell into step with someone nearby and discovered that he, too, was a writer. The pair chatted intermittently until crossing the finish line, at which point Courtenay asked his new friend's name. "Stephen King," the guy replied.

I contact the office of the master of the chiller-thriller to check the details of the story. The email from King's executive assistant, Marsha De Filippo, is short and surprising: "Stephen has never run in the Boston marathon."

A small thing. But it is still in my mind when I come across an account by Courtenay of how he came to migrate to Australia. "I was in a bar in Earls Court in London," he is quoted as saying, "and there was this unbelievably beautiful woman with a man you just knew was going to end up fat and bald. They were talking to each other about how Australia was a cultural desert that didn't appreciate their talent, which is why they'd come to the UK, and I was thinking, 'I don't have much talent, maybe that'd be okay for me.' Of course, it turned out they were Clive James and Germaine Greer."

The trouble is that Courtenay moved to Australia in 1958, several years before James and Greer went to England and became celebrated expatriates. Again, it could be an inconsequential error. Or it could be part of a pattern.

Friends of Courtenay will tell you that he is the warmest, most wonderful guy in the world. "'Great' is an overused word, but Bryce is actually a great man," says British polar trekker Robert Swan, while one-time prime-ministerial adviser Simon Balderstone describes him as "a class act". Chair of a charitable foundation that provides education and health services to the people of Nepal, Balderstone met Courtenay through Gee, who co-founded the adventure travel company Australian Himalayan Expeditions and sits on the foundation's board. "Christine just adores him, and vice versa," says Balderstone. "He says to me all the time, 'I'll do anything for my darling Christine, and that includes helping you.' " Courtenay's support for the foundation and a host of other charities and humanitarian organisations runs to more than writing cheques. "He's very generous financially and very generous with his time," Balderstone says. "With Bryce, it's all-encompassing. It's generosity of spirit."

Philanthropy is particularly impressive in one who has had to be sturdily self-reliant himself. "Whatever he's done, he's done by himself, with no help," says Courtenay's close friend Alex Hamill, former head of the George Patterson advertising agency. "He's a man who has never had anyone to rely upon."

Courtenay arrived on these shores with little money and no job prospects but a lot of ambition. He has often said that as his ship sailed up Sydney Harbour, he caught a glimpse of a large white house with walls covered in bright bougainvillea and resolved that one day he would own it. Seventeen years later, after carving out a dazzling career in advertising, he turned the key in the lock. It is not much of a stretch to think of Courtenay as Sydney's version of Don Draper, the brilliant, hard-living creative director of the Madison Avenue firm Sterling Cooper in the hit television series Mad Men. "He was very famous for his long lunches," Hamill says. "He was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker. Scotch, mostly."

As a late-summer storm brews outside his living-room window, Courtenay tells me a well-polished anecdote about the time the manufacturers of Mortein threatened to dump McCann Erickson, the agency that then employed him, because their insect spray wasn't selling. Summoned to the office for an emergency meeting, he spent the 20-minute taxi ride jotting the outline of a new campaign on the back of an envelope: "I said to the cab driver, 'What's your name?' He said, 'Louie.' And I wrote this thing about a fly."

Visitors to the Mortein website can view a TV ad starring a fly called Louie that dates from 1957, before Courtenay got his start in the industry. He cannot have invented the character, as he has long claimed, but he did play a significant part in the creation of the singing Louie that first appeared on our screens in 1962 and was still there, spreading disease with the greatest of ease, some five decades later. (Late last year, Mortein announced Louie was finally to be killed off, but after a public outcry, the company agreed to a stay of execution. At time of writing, his fate is undecided.)

When Courtenay decided to become a novelist, his marketing nous stood him in good stead. "There are writers in this country who are better than me," he says, echoing the words of many a reviewer. But no one disputes that when it comes to pitching a book to the paying public, the former adman is in a class of his own. Who else tests cover designs with focus groups, distributes sample chapters at railway stations and hires sky-writers to emblazon titles high above cities? With one of his novels, he went so far as to launch a tie-in beer (Tommo & Hawk Premium Ale). "Bryce is, beyond anything else, a promoter," says Hamill. "There are some great authors in Australia, and I know many of them, who won't get off their bums and sign books in shopping centres."

Whereas Courtenay is never happier than sitting in-store with a pen in his hand and a queue of fans in front of him. Owen Denmeade, another of his old advertising mates, salutes him for the enthusiasm he brings to the task. How many title pages has he autographed over the years? Denmeade hates to think. "We used to say, if you've got an unsigned copy of a Bryce Courtenay book, it's worth a lot of money."

Bookshelves across Australia groan under the weight of Courtenay's whopping novels - more than 700 pages, many of them. Bob Sessions, his publisher at Penguin Australia, says that since 1997 he has sold 9.5 million volumes, close to eight million of them in this country. The Power of One is way out in front but all his titles do well. "When the book trade was in better health, it was quite common for us to sell more than 250,000 copies of a new Bryce Courtenay," says Sessions. These days, it is more likely to be about 200,000. "Which is 100,000 more than anybody else except Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code."

According to Shaun Symonds at Nielsen BookScan, he easily beats Matthew Reilly and Di Morrissey, currently the next most popular Australian novelists. Courtenay is the author of 12 of the top 50 most borrowed titles in public libraries since surveys began almost 40 years ago, and four of the top 10. (Tommo & Hawk and The Potato Factory come in first and second, Jessica and Solomon's Song eighth and ninth.) Reilly has only two books in the top 50, Morrissey none.

Who are Courtenay's readers? "I don't think they're the kind of people who would normally attempt a big book, to be honest with you," says Sessions, explaining that Courtenay's skill is in knowing how to hook them and draw them along: "They want a strong plot with lots of twists and turns, and they want colourful characters - sometimes too large and too colourful to be true, but that's okay." He regards Courtenay as a master of old-fashioned storytelling. "I call him a latter-day Charles Dickens."

Like the great 19th-century English novelist, who gave readings and lectures to packed houses, Courtenay is a natural performer. "He really does connect with people," says Sandy Grant, who published his first five titles when he was chief executive of Reed Australia. In the early days on the promotional trail, Grant wondered how Courtenay's heart-on-sleeve style would go over with audiences. "But the crowds loved it. They were all on their feet, rushing to embrace him."

I remark in passing that Grant must have come to know Courtenay pretty well. After a pause, he replies that he is not sure how well anyone knows him. "I wouldn't know what was real and what wasn't real, in retrospect," Grant says.

Suddenly the theme music from Mad Men is playing in my head. The history and true identity of Don Draper are a mystery to most of the other characters in the show. "Draper? Who knows anything about that guy?" says one of his colleagues at Sterling Cooper. "No one's ever lifted that rock."

Courtenay holds up his left hand and shows me a scar on the forefinger. He says he got it more than 70 years ago, at an orphanage outside Duiwelskloof, a small town at the base of the Limpopo mountains in north-east South Africa. He was seven years old, and gathering firewood to heat the water for the children's weekly showers, when he started playing with an axe a bigger boy had left in a log. Next thing, his finger was hanging off and the matron was giving him a hiding. "People who worked in orphanages were pretty rough. We got beaten so often on our bums that we got these permanent marks. We used to call it Chinese writing."

He says he walked the 10 kilometres to the doctor's surgery with his injured hand wrapped in a tea-towel, arriving so weak from loss of blood that he passed out under a mango tree. The doctor found him there that night and stitched him up but then was called away to an emergency. "I crawled under his house, which was like a Queenslander, on stilts," Courtenay says. "I woke up in the morning and the sun was streaming through the floorboards on the verandah. I'd been lying against a packing case and, being curious, I opened it. It was full of books. On top was a red morocco leather book with gold edging to the pages. I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life."

He took the precious volume back to the orphanage, he says, where he hid it until a kindly temporary teacher arrived from Johannesburg. "She was the first person ever to gain my confidence. I took her my book and said, 'Please teach me to read this.' " The text was in English, which presented a problem. Courtenay had been in the orphanage since he was a baby, he says, and despite his Anglo surname, spoke only Afrikaans. But both he and his teacher were up for the challenge: "She taught me to read English! I could read it before I could speak it."

While I am getting my head around that, he gallops on. "The book was called The Abolition of Slavery in the Cape Province 1834. And by the age of 11, I could recite every single one of the 813 pages. I learnt the whole thing by rote."

What I want to say is, "Whoa there ... 813 pages? By rote?" But Courtenay has already moved on to the bit where, with his teacher's encouragement, he sits for a scholarship to King Edward VII School, one of Johannesburg's leading boys' colleges. "She said, 'You won't win at 11 because it's mostly won by 14-year-olds and nobody has ever won it at 11. But I want you to sit it for the next three years and you'll get it, I feel sure." Courtenay blitzed the exam at his first attempt, he says, and became the youngest person ever to win the scholarship - "with the highest marks ever achieved, I think".

Mind you, he felt a bit out of place among middle-class students from stable homes. On ABC TV's Talking Heads in 2006, he said: "I never wanted anybody to know that I had no background, that there was just this darkness, a vacuum in the back of me, that I came from nothing and no one." (As if he sprang from a Petri dish, remarked one TV reviewer.) On ABC Radio in 2010, he said he slept on park benches in the school holidays rather than return to the orphanage. He befriended derelicts and, at the end of each vacation, "I used to line them up and take them to hospital and have them all checked out, because drunks don't die of alcohol, they die of other things." His actions did not go unnoticed: "By the time I had reached my matric year, Johannesburg Hospital at Witwatersrand University had offered me a scholarship in medicine."

Courtenay tells me he excelled at school ("I was a so-called brilliant student, I could do anything"). But in the radio interview, he made clear that he avoided getting too close to the other boys. "If you're going to survive, the

one thing you can't do is tell 'em anything," he said. "You have to be totally secretive about who you are, what you are. You also learn to lie, of course."

Working from 7am to 7pm, seven days a week, Courtenay takes seven months to write a novel. He starts work the day after Australia Day and finishes on August 31, delivering each chapter to Penguin on completion to ensure that the book can be edited, printed and in the shops for the Christmas rush. "The last six books I've finished within an hour of each other," he says, "right to the point of having a courier waiting for the last chapter at the front door."

To help him keep to such a tight timetable, he employs a full-time researcher, his brother-in-law Bruce Gee. "Like a lot of people, he's not a terribly quick reader," says Bruce. "My job is to get information to him in a predigested form." Also entrusted with checking each day's output for errors, Bruce points out that he isn't the only one on the payroll. "People advise us on music, for instance, and on esoteric things like historical railways. All sorts of stuff ... Bryce is almost a cottage industry."

Despite all this assistance, some of Courtenay's novels have received withering reviews. Writing in The Age, Juliette Hughes described Sylvia - which is set during the 12th-century children's crusade and has a beautiful, preternaturally gifted teenage heroine - as "a book so mystifyingly bad that the main thought you come away with after struggling through it is 'Why?'" This sort of negativity makes Courtenay hopping mad. After The Power of One got mixed notices in some Australian publications, he pointed out indignantly that it had been lauded overseas. "The Kirkus Reviews called it a literary masterpiece," he said. (Actually, Kirkus called it "surprisingly refreshing", "somewhat endearing" and an example of "sturdy, workmanlike prose".)

Courtenay is convinced that some of the literati have been out to get him from the start: "They decided, 'This guy's an adman and he couldn't possibly be writing anything but crap.'" Fellow Australian adman-turned-novelist Peter Carey has encountered no such prejudice - in fact, he has been awarded two Booker Prizes - but Courtenay has an explanation for that: Carey himself is "a perfect example of that kind of inane literary snobbery", he has said in the past. He tells me, "I've known him for 30 years and I like his work, certainly, but he's a very strange guy." He once stopped to chat to Carey in an airport lounge, he says, and noticed after a while that the other writer was casting anxious glances over his shoulder. "I said, 'Peter, are you waiting for somebody?' He said, 'Bryce, look, I'd rather not be seen with you.'" (Carey denies that this happened.)

Courtenay has little doubt that if he put his mind to it, he could win the sort of accolades heaped on Carey and West Australian novelist Tim Winton. "Timmy typically takes three to four years to write a book," he has been quoted as saying. "I know if I took that long I could write a superb literary novel, but I'm not vaguely interested in doing that."

Courtenay likes to think he has always stood up for the principle of a fair go for all. In Helen Chryssides' 1995 book A Different Light: Ways of Being Australian, he says he read in a newspaper when he was at school that a professor in Alabama had determined the negroid brain was smaller than that of Caucasians, thereby establishing that blacks were inferior to whites. He says he knew even at 12 that this was nonsense, so he took up his headmaster's challenge to argue the case at the next meeting of the debating society. He phoned Witwatersrand University's anthopology department, hoping to get some help with his research, and "the guy that answered was Professor Louis Leakey, the world-famous anthropologist". The way Courtenay tells it, the distinguished authority on human evolution was temporarily based at the university and "he said, 'Son, wait there, I'm coming over.' "

One of Leakey's biographers, Mary Bowman-Kruhm, tells me she can find no record of Leakey spending an interlude at Witwatersrand, and that she doubts he was even in South Africa at the time in question, though anything is possible. In any case, Courtenay says he lost the debate despite Leakey's coaching: "I couldn't beat the prejudice."

As thunder rumbles over Canberra, he tells how he started literacy lessons for the college's black servants and others who wanted to attend. "I had anything up to 400 Africans in the school hall on a Sunday," he says. "They all had slates and they'd wear their best clothes - mismatching jackets etcetera - and they'd be scrubbed clean and shiny." Twice, the police arrived and demanded the classes be shut down. The second time, "they said, 'We'll close the school if he doesn't close his school.' "

To the rescue came Trevor Huddleston, an Anglican priest and anti-apartheid activist who offered the use of his church hall, Courtenay says, but when the lessons moved there, police torched the building. (Neither the school nor the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre has any record of the classes, which doesn't mean they didn't take place. A memorial centre spokesman, Tricia Sibbons, is adamant the church hall never burned down.)

Courtenay says that as a young man he spent a year in Zambian copper mines, detonating high explosives underground in a job so dangerous that "of the 12 guys who joined with me, six were dead by the end of the time I was there". Back in South Africa, preparing to embark for the UK to attend the London School of Journalism (having knocked back the offer of a place at Oxford), he was visited by a police officer who told him if he ever returned, he would be put under house arrest. As it turned out, he wasn't even tempted to go back because in London he met and fell in love with a charming and cultivated young Australian, Benita Solomon. They married after he followed her back to Sydney.

The couple had three sons - Brett, now 50, Adam, 48, and Damon, the youngest, who had haemophilia and died aged 24 in 1991 of AIDS acquired from a transfusion of a blood product. Courtenay has said that writing April Fool's Day was "the single hardest thing I've ever done in my life. I had to write the absolute, total, complete truth." In the book, he says advertising industry heavyweight Sim Rubinsohn persuaded Gough Whitlam's government to introduce legislation that would permit parents to give their children transfusions at home, rather than having to rush back and forth to hospital. But talking to me, Courtenay takes credit for lobbying Whitlam himself: "One day I said to him, 'Gough, if ever you are prime minister, and I'm sure you are going to be, can you make sure that they allow home transfusions? He said, 'Bryce, I promise you.'"

In fact, home transfusions started in the 1970s at the instigation of doctors, says Henry Ekert, who at the time was director of clinical haematology at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital and head of Victoria's haemophilia treatment program. "We started home treatment without checking with Gough Whitlam or anybody else because it was not necessary to have legislation," Ekert says.

A section of April Fool's Day was purportedly written by Damon's girlfriend, Celeste Coucke, but she tells me that Courtenay was really the author. "It's my story but it's in his words," says Coucke, who came to regret the arrangement. "I had no editorial control over what was written, which actually was very upsetting for me at the time. There were things there that I didn't want to be published and Bryce refused to remove them." She was then in her early 20s: "If I had been older, I probably would have stood up for myself."

Though Coucke was close to Courtenay in the six years she spent in the bosom of his family, she learnt to take what he said with a grain of salt. His sons referred to "dad-facts", Coucke says. "I called them Bryce-facts." In those days, though, "he was a very different person. I think that fame has changed him a great deal. It worries me that he believes his own hype."

Sometimes Courtenay describes himself as an orphan. More often, he says he was put in an orphanage when he was a few months old by a single mother too poor and mentally unstable to look after him. "My mother was obviously bipolar," he tells me. "She sometimes used to take me out of the orphanage and then I'd go back again. Actually, in the end, I just asked to stay. It was too hard."

Courtenay has a sister, Rosemary Anderson, 79, who lives with her husband in San Diego. When I phone her a few days after visiting Courtenay, she says he has always been very generous to her. "He's a darling person," she says. But she admits she was dismayed when she read The Power of One because "it wasn't at all what our childhood had been".

Having remained silent all these years, Anderson feels a responsibility to tell the truth as she knows it. "It's awkward," she says, "because it's his word against mine ... I don't want to get into Bryce's bad books about this." But the fact is, Courtenay was not raised in an orphanage. The siblings certainly spent time in one, she says, and she is sure that for her little brother, then aged five, it was a horrible experience. "But it wasn't for long. It was a matter of weeks or months." This was in Krugersdorp, north-west of Johannesburg, when their mother, Maude "Paddy" Greer, was briefly married to a man named Roberts. Anderson says they later boarded for about six months at a school in Duiwelskloof, where Courtenay was mercilessly bullied. For the most part, though, they were with their mother, a dressmaker and sales assistant who was subject to "nervous breakdowns" but nevertheless did her best for her children. "We had a difficult start in life," says Anderson, "but we had a mother who truly loved us and showed that she did. We both adored her."

Courtenay is patron of a children's charity called The Pyjama Foundation. On its website, he says he can relate to kids who have been neglected or abandoned: "I was 15 years old before I was embraced or kissed." Anderson demurs. "My mother was very affectionate," she says. "Bryce loved sitting on her lap even when he was quite a big boy." The two were quite similar in nature, she adds. "They were both very loving, outgoing people."

Asked if her mother was upset by the content of The Power of One, Anderson says: "It may have hurt her, but I think she understood that he wanted to sell that book and it had to be interesting." Courtenay, who supported his mother financially, has said that she finally told him his father's name the night before she died, aged 93. But Anderson insists that brother and sister had known from their early teens that Arthur Ryder, the married clothing salesman they had thought to be their godfather, was in fact their father. She says Courtenay did not win a

scholarship to college; Ryder paid his boarding fees. He did not spend holidays on park benches, either. And he grew up speaking English, not Afrikaans.

Maude Greer gave her children the surname Courtenay, but her son was registered as Arthur Bryce Courtenay Roberts at King Edward VII School, where he completed his final year in 1951. On the Pyjama Foundation website, he says he graduated as "one of the most applied and academically gifted children the school has seen". David Williams, the school's foundation director, looks up old college magazines and sends puzzling news: "The 1952 magazine lists the matriculants in the Transvaal Secondary School Certificate examination for the previous year - his name does not appear in that list."

After the email from Williams and my conversation with Anderson, I phone Courtenay. "Of course I won a scholarship," he says indignantly. His sister is wrong about other things, too: when she was at the school in Duiwelskloof, he was at an institution called The Boys' Farm outside the town. It was there that he had the accident with the axe. "My sister is a deeply religious, Pentecostal person," he says. "She gives her version of the truth. You have to decide."

When I mention his name's absence from the King Edward VII School matriculation list, there is a brief silence on the line. "I am astonished," Courtenay says. "But I can't say more than that." A couple of minutes later, he winds up the call.

"I don't want to say any more. Honestly, this is getting absurd. I mean, my life is an open book."

Writers have a propensity for re- inventing themselves, says Peter Pierce, editor of The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia. "I don't think we should single Courtenay out for so carefully creating his own story. Dickens was a wonderful self-fashioner and self-publicist. Otherwise he wouldn't have made more money on the stage than he did from writing."

At Penguin Australia, Bob Sessions sees Courtenay's readiness to rewrite reality as no more than a symptom of a hyperactive imagination: "It's just a question of where one draws the line between fact and fantasy. And his line is drawn somewhere different, probably, to yours and mine."

As a journalist, Adam Courtenay is by trade and temperament a truth-seeker, but he says in defence of his father: "He can find the inner truth in people in a way that many other writers who simply stick to the plain facts are incapable of doing."

For Owen Denmeade, the tall tales are part and parcel of his friend's appeal. "He's a storyteller, a bullshit artist," Denmeade says cheerfully. "But he's not a hurtful bullshit artist. He doesn't set out to damage anyone. Absolutely never. He's never set out to bring anyone down."

Celeste Coucke isn't sure that she is prepared to let him off that lightly. To dream up Bryce-facts is one thing, she says. "To turn them into some sort of boys' own adventure so that you receive adulation, I just find that very odd. A child does that, not a grown man."

In my original conversation with Courtenay, he makes clear that, at some level, his confabulation is a protective strategy. "I can actually see a 'naked fact', " he says. "A 'naked fact' is about me, at seven, standing in the nude with my hands over my scrotum, because I'd been circumcised for some reason, and nobody else in the orphanage was circumcised. And I have this impulse to dress [the fact] up - put on a pair of dancing shoes and a bow tie and comb its hair and say, 'Go for it, kid.'"

I ask if he always knows when he has thrown the switch to vaudeville. "Absolutely," he replies. He doesn't get mixed up about what is and isn't true? "Good Lord, no."

But he can see that the tap-dancing causes problems. "It just goes too far sometimes. I get carried away ... It's hard to excuse, in fact it's probably inexcusable. But it's who I am."

Courtenay left Benita in 1998 after almost 40 years of marriage. They remained friends and he was at her bedside when she died of acute myeloid leukaemia in 2007. At her funeral, he sang Gershwin's Summertime, which seemed to Coucke, for one, a little over the top: "You were sort of thinking, 'This is not about you.'"

Last October, Courtenay married Christine, his partner of five years (having earlier had a relationship with her identical twin, literary agent Margaret Gee). They moved to Canberra from the NSW southern highlands to be closer to medical specialists - besides the cancer surgery, he has had a heart valve replacement, and his back is

so bad he wouldn't mind an operation on that, too. But it was a bout of shingles last year that stopped him delivering his new book, Jack of Diamonds. It wasn't the pain that was the problem ("I don't give a shit about pain") but the fact that the medication scrambled his brain. Says Alex Hamill, who reads all Courtenay's work in manuscript form: "It became apparent to me around the middle of this book that it just wasn't going anywhere. I said to Christine, 'This book is quite strange.'"

Courtenay was inconsolable about missing his first deadline in two decades. "I know how stupid it is," he says, "but when you have one of those A-type personalities where achievement is important, and you have my kind of background, then ... failure is unthinkable." It wasn't as though he was hanging on the income from the book's sales, though, according to Gee, he is not as wealthy as might be imagined. "He could be worth an absolute fortune," she says, "and his accountant wrings his hands that he's not. He's lost it, given it away, made bad business decisions, whatever." Courtenay shrugs: "Money doesn't interest me even vaguely."

The hero of Jack of Diamonds is a musician and gambler named Jack Spayd. According to advance publicity, he is "a young, talented man, fighting to achieve his ambitions, and having to use his considerable talents to find his way in a perilous world". Which could be a synopsis of many of Courtenay's books. Anyway, the author was back on the job at the first opportunity, attacking his computer keyboard with hands so badly affected by arthritis that he can type with only two fingers. "The discipline is just breath-taking," Gee says of his approach to his writing. "People think it pours out of him. But I see very little ecstasy and a lot of agony."

His son, Brett, watches all this with bemusement. "I mean, why? What's to prove?" he asks; he loves Courtenay and has long wished he would devote less time to his work and more to his family. "But it's not for me to say, 'Hey, that's a poor substitute for living, breathing grandchildren.' It's something for him to decide himself." It seems to Coucke that for Courtenay, "the story is everything. But at what cost really? It's sort of like winning at the expense of everything else. Winning is a wonderful thing but you'd want your family to be there on the finishing line, too, one would think."

The cancer could return at any time. Courtenay says his doctors have told him there is a 50 per cent chance it will recur within two years. When I look at him sympathetically, he protests that those are pretty good odds. "I'll take a 50-50 gamble on anything," he says.

Heads you live, tails you die. "You win or you lose. I mean, there isn't anything in between."

This article originally appeared in Good Weekend on January 21.

The Queen and Prince Philip were working their way around a garden party at Government House in Perth last October when the prince stopped to chat to a middle-aged woman in a broad-brimmed black hat. To his genial inquiry about why she was on the guest list, she replied that she was merely a loyal subject. He asked her again. "But she was incredibly modest - refused to say why she was there," says federal Liberal MP Barry Haase's daughter Danielle, who was standing near enough to hear the exchange. "He looked a bit annoyed, in fact, because he was looking for a straight answer. So he came out with something like, 'Perhaps it's because you have the largest hat in Western Australia.' She laughed, and he laughed, and then he moved on."

He said he wanted to remember her as the 'neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady' she had been rather than 'the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become'. Prince Philip had just met Gina Rinehart, ranked by US business media company Forbes as the 19th most powerful woman in the world - 30 places ahead of Queen Elizabeth II. Rinehart is the richest Australian in history (and far richer than the Queen), with a net worth of about $10 billion. At least, that is one recent estimate. The truth is, her fortune is growing so fast that it is difficult for financial analysts to keep track of it. The 57-year-old mining magnate could overtake Mexican telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim and Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the world's wealthiest individual, Forbes says, and she is "wielding her bank account for influence".

Rinehart is a person of strong convictions. Confident she knows what is best for this country, she increasingly seeks to sway public opinion - backing campaigns against Labor's mining tax and carbon tax, for instance, and sponsoring climate-change denialists. She has also begun investing in the media, paying $165 million for a 10 per cent stake in the Ten television network and close to $100 million for about four per cent of Fairfax Media (publisher of Good Weekend). By her standards, of course, these sums are small change. Perth business writer Tim Treadgold points out that if Rinehart were listed on the stock exchange, she would be valued at more than Fairfax, Ten, the Seven network, David Jones and Qantas. Combined.

Considering her clout, she has a remarkably low profile. The prince isn't the only one to have found Rinehart evasive - she routinely stonewalls journalists' inquiries and declines requests for interviews. What strikes me as I start researching this story is how little we really know about her. That, and how nervous people get at the mention of her name.

"She's a person who likes to keep to herself," says the Nationals' normally loquacious Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce. "I don't think I'll be saying much more than that actually." Rinehart took Joyce to Hyderabad to attend a lavish wedding hosted by a business associate last year. But the senator has no desire to discuss the Indian trip or anything else relating to Rinehart. "I'm mates with her and I know she likes her privacy," he says. "If I was to start talking about her, then I suppose she wouldn't be mates with me."

Rinehart is the daughter of Lang Hancock, the West Australian prospector credited with discovering mountains of iron ore in the state's rugged north-west, where his family had been pastoralists for generations. The Pilbara, as the region is known, is twice the size of Victoria. As an only child and Hancock's sole heir, Rinehart grew up knowing she would one day control vast stretches of mineral-rich outback. "Is she as tough as you?" a television reporter once asked Hancock, who replied, "Oh, tougher. Yeah, by a long way."

Her voice is soft and her manner demure but it has never been a good idea to cross Rinehart. "Gina tries to be nice to everybody," wrote one of her father's biographers, Robert Duffield, when she was 22, but "if they disappoint her, or annoy her, or in any way seem to threaten her, the friendly filter in the opal-clear eyes drops to reveal a more steely blue ... It is not anger, for anger is an uncontrolled emotion and Gina despises people who lose control of themselves, for whatever reason."

The princess of the Pilbara doesn't shout. She sues. While her friends stay silent about her for fear of falling out of favour, her critics watch their words because they don't want to get a writ. Lawyer Nick Styant-Browne knows from personal experience how relentless a litigant she can be. "Indefatigable. She does not give up," says Styant-Browne, who acted for Hancock's third wife, Rose, in the epic battle that erupted when the old man died in

1992. Styant-Browne figures that by the time the dust settled more than a decade later, Rinehart had spent tens of millions in legal fees. "She went through an extraordinary number of lawyers, including the best in the country," he says. "She kind of exhausted the Perth bar and then went to the Melbourne and Sydney bars. When she'd lose a round, she would retain a new set of lawyers to dream up some new theory to continue the fight."

Now Rinehart is embroiled in an even more explosive family dispute. At stake are billions of dollars and the future of what she has referred to, without irony, as "the House of Hancock". Three of her four children - John, Bianca and Hope - are attempting to have her removed as trustee of the Hope Margaret Hancock Trust, which holds about 25 per cent of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd, the main family company. Only Ginia, her youngest daughter, has sided with Rinehart. "It's a terribly sad situation," says Gloria Schultz, wife of federal Liberal MP Alby Schultz and a close friend of Rinehart. "Gina loves her children. Adores her grandchildren. I know she is deeply hurt by it."

Others sympathise with the kids, saying they are justified in arguing that they have waited long enough for their inheritance and that Rinehart, who is executive chairman of Hancock Prospecting, has stymied their attempts to play a meaningful role in the family business. "Growing the family company is all I have wanted to do," Rinehart's eldest child and only son, John, now 36, told Steve Pennells of The West Australian newspaper as long ago as 2003, "but my mother's attitude makes this impossible. She does not want to relinquish one ounce of control and has a very narrow view of business and relationships."

When I call Hancock Prospecting, a receptionist tells me pleasantly that she cannot put me through to anyone. "It's company policy, from our chairman," she says. "I'm sure you can appreciate we get hundreds and hundreds of calls."

Yes, but ... why block them? "It's just something that we're asked to do. Everything is sent in via email."

I submit a request to interview Rinehart, without much hope that she will agree to it. A person who has known her a long time says she divides the world into friends and enemies: unless you actively support her, she presumes that you are against her. And since journalists aim for impartiality, they fall into the latter category. "All journalists are communists," he says, summing up his interpretation of Rinehart's attitude, "and all media proprietors are weak." Despite her Fairfax shareholding, she is said to particularly dislike reporters from this company. Waiting to hear back from her, I cross my fingers that she hasn't read an article about the Government House garden party on the websites of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. It is headlined "Prince Philip pokes fun at Gina Rinehart", and quotes a bystander who claims to have heard the prince say, "That hat could poke someone's eye out."

Tim Treadgold, who writes for Forbes magazine, says that after Rinehart knocked back one of his interview requests, she sent him a story about her business that he thought read as if she had written it herself. "It purported to be based on my questions and her answers," Treadgold says. "But I'd never asked the questions. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

The email that arrives for me from Hancock Prospecting is from "Mark Bickerton, Information Manager", but the way it is worded makes me wonder whether Rinehart had a hand in composing it. "Regarding the recent discussion with HRH at Government House in West Australia," it says, "other media who were present reported it was a very happy and relaxed discussion between HRH and Mrs Rinehart ... Your publication however chose to make the extraordinary and unbelievable claim that HRH told Mrs Rinehart that her non-pointy hat was pointy and may poke someone's eye out! Obviously HRH would have seen many hats over the years and would not choose to stop to speak to someone for the purpose of criticising their hat, including a hat worn in honour of his wife, the Queen. This is an insult by the SMH to not only Mrs Rinehart, but importantly HRH."

And no, she doesn't want to be interviewed.

In the film The Devil Wears Prada, staff at Runway magazine skitter about the office in anxious circles when they get word that their editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, in ice-queen mode), is about to make her morning entrance. One of Rinehart's former employees says she found the scene too familiar to be funny. "The phone call would come: 'She's on her way', and the staff would go into a panic. It's amazing, really, that someone can have that effect on everyone."

Rinehart is the sort of boss who inspires devotion in some and rebellion in others. "She treats her employees well but you don't cross her: it's 'Yes, Mrs Rinehart', 'No, Mrs Rinehart', " says one who found the atmosphere so oppressive she eventually left. Another person, who insisted on calling her Gina ("I was older than her") and now works for another resources group, says Rinehart's management style did not sit well with some senior staff. "As an executive, you want to have a bit of autonomy and know you've got some areas where you can make

decisions," he says. "But she used to make all the major calls. And of course, if you end up disagreeing with her, 'You're outta here!' " He laughs. "Doesn't take 'no' well."

At the headquarters of Hancock Prospecting in West Perth, there is a fingerprint-recognition security system and the glass in the reception area is rumoured to be bulletproof. Former employees describe a corporate culture so guarded and secretive that they sometimes suspected Rinehart was the only one who really knew what was going on. Fred Madden, who resigned in 1994 after nine months as chief executive (and, unlike most departing employees, refused to sign a confidentiality agreement), says he found dealing with Rinehart extremely difficult. "You didn't know where you stood with her," he says. "You just didn't know where she was coming from, or where she was going."

The fortress mentality appears to extend to the Hancock family compound in the expensive Perth suburb of Dalkeith. Set in verdant grounds overlooking the Swan River are two large houses - one of them bought by Hancock in the 1950s, the other built for Rinehart during her first marriage. Cameras are mounted above the closed front gates, and signs say "Danger High Voltage" and "Electric Fence".

Rinehart is rarely seen out and about. Many were surprised when in June 2010 she joined fellow iron-ore tycoon Andrew Forrest in addressing a rally against the federal government's proposed mining tax. She even led an "Axe the Tax" chant. Tim Treadgold says drily: "The billionaires, united, will never be defeated. Who told her it was okay to stand on the back of a flatbed truck in her pearls - very large pearls - and protest about a tax which is designed to spread the revenue from Australia's resources boom through the community?"

But she got her message across. Two weeks after the rally, Labor dumped prime minister Kevin Rudd, the tax's chief advocate, and replaced him with Julia Gillard, who immediately announced her intention to reach a compromise with the mining bosses. It has been estimated that Gillard's watered-down tax, which was passed by the House of Representatives last November, could bring $10 billion less into the government's coffers each year. Meanwhile, according to BRW magazine, Rinehart's net worth more than doubled from $4.75 billion in 2010 to $10.3 billion in 2011.

From her father, Rinehart inherited an income stream that at the current iron-ore price - about $140 a tonne - amounts to around $100 million a year. This flows from a deal struck in 1962 by Hancock and his business partner, Peter Wright, who transferred leases in the Hamersley Range to mining giant Rio Tinto (then CRA) in exchange for a royalty of 2.5 per cent of the revenue from ore sales. Hancock never realised his burning ambition to own iron-ore mines, but Rinehart is making up for that. In 2007, in equal partnership with Rio Tinto, she opened the huge Hope Downs mine in the Pilbara. Her next project, the even larger Roy Hill mine, 277 kilometres south of Port Hedland, is expected to start exporting ore in 2014.

She also has valuable coal leases (though she sold most of her assets in Queensland's Galilee Basin to Indian conglomerate GVK for $1.3 billion last year) and she is a partner in Jacaranda Alliance, which explores for uranium, lead, gold, diamonds and petroleum. Not that she really needs any of these sidelines. Treadgold calculates that the Hope Downs mine alone is likely to deliver her an annual profit of more than $2 billion (about $40 million a week) when it reaches full production of 45 million tonnes a year. "There's no doubt she has the potential to be the world's richest person," he says. "It depends on China. If China's demand for iron ore, coal and other commodities continues to grow, then she's perfectly placed to ride the dragon to incredible wealth."

Despite this, she has a reputation for penny-pinching. One former employee tells of being instructed to phone suppliers of office equipment to haggle over even the smallest bills. Another says he got the impression that Rinehart personally scrutinised staff expenses claims. "She had a thing in the back of her mind that everybody, and I mean everybody, was out to do her down, to take a dollar off her," he says. "She trusted nobody and assumed the worst of everybody."

What no one questions is Rinehart's work ethic. She reportedly employs two personal assistants, one to start early and the other for the late shift. "There is no downtime whatsoever for Gina Rinehart," says Liberal MP Teresa Gambaro, one of three parliamentarians - along with Barnaby Joyce and deputy federal opposition leader Julie Bishop - to accompany Rinehart to the Hyderabad wedding of the granddaughter of GVK chairman G. V. Krishna Reddy. This was shortly before Rinehart and GVK finalised the Galilee Basin deal. "She was there to make sure the business was concluded," says Gambaro, who came home impressed by Rinehart's determination and exhausted by her conversation. "I haven't met anyone else who can talk coal for nine hours." All the way to India? "Pretty much."

I email Mark Bickerton to ask if Rinehart can suggest friends for me to interview, and if I can check facts with her. No, he says, not unless she can have a draft of the story. What becomes clear is that Rinehart feels sorely underappreciated in Australia. "In Namibia, there is an Entrepreneurial Promotion Academy designed to encourage entrepreneurs who Mrs Rinehart met at CHOGM business," Bickerton writes, "and they want

entrepreneurs in their country! Other countries have asked Mrs Rinehart to become a resident of their country as they also value entrepreneurs."

Bickerton points out that Rinehart was named "Masterclass CEO of the Year" at the 2011 Global Leadership Awards. I find out later that these awards are presented by a bi-monthly Malaysian magazine with a print run of just 15,000 copies. Undoubtedly an achievement, though.

Advertising and broadcasting supremo John Singleton has been a confidant of Rinehart for more than four decades and it seems to him that she has one overriding goal: "She sees it as her destiny to fulfil Lang's dream. And nothing will stop her from doing that."

During one of her estrangements from her son, John, Rinehart started grooming her oldest daughter, Bianca, to take the reins of the family firm. Now it appears that Ginia, 25, her youngest child, is the anointed one. She has reportedly been appointed by Rinehart to the boards of three family companies. What is this about?

"I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a close observer of the family," Singleton says. "It's because the business comes first. Being a parent is secondary. It's just, 'Where do they fit into the dynasty? Are they iron or are they coal or are they uranium?' If they don't fit into the company, there's no role for them."

Singleton was in his 20s and Rinehart in her early teens when they first met. It was Hancock who was really his friend back then, but over the years Singleton spent a lot of time watching father and daughter interact. "I was with them as much as anyone was," he says. And here is what he knows: to understand Rinehart, it is important to look at her relationship with Langley George Hancock.

The so-called king of the Pilbara was regarded by his admirers as an eccentric visionary who changed Australia by seeing its potential as one of the world's great mining nations. His critics saw him as a ruthless opportunist, interested only in enriching himself. In the 1930s, he established the infamous blue asbestos mine at Wittenoom, then suggested that those who died from asbestos-related cancer were somehow themselves to blame. He cheerfully did business with the brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Politically, he was so far to the right that at times even his close friend, Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, must have blushed. Racist? At one point, Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians - particularly "no-good half-castes" - to collect their welfare cheques from a central location: "And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future."

His daughter worshipped him. "I think my father is nearly perfect," Rinehart said at the age of 12 on a BBC documentary, Man of Iron. Her mother, Hope, who was Hancock's second wife, told a magazine that she had overheard Gina say she didn't intend to sit for her junior school certificate because "Mummy didn't, and look what happened to her. She married Daddy." Hope had breast cancer, and though she lived long enough to dandle two grandchildren on her knee, was often unwell. Hancock was the dominant figure in Rinehart's childhood. "They were just inseparable," Singleton says.

Even when she was a weekly boarder at St Hilda's Anglican School for Girls in Perth, Hancock often arrived in his white Jaguar to visit her in the afternoons. "He'd park in the driveway," remembers one of Rinehart's former dorm-mates, "and Gina would spend the hours after school and before dinner in the car, talking to her father." Hancock later suggested that both had resented the extent to which Rinehart's education kept them apart. "School was just a nasty interlude to put up with," he said. "Then she tried a year doing economics at Sydney University but she found out it was basically communist ..."

Rinehart told Robert Duffield, author of the Hancock biography Rogue Bull, that the university taught "the wrong things". Duffield noted that she parroted Hancock's political views, "mastering all his stock tracts, phrase by phrase". Singleton was aware of this, too: "I mean, a conversation with Gina was a conversation with Lang. They both had the same fanaticism ... If Lang paused, Gina could finish the sentence."

Their pet subjects included the desirability of Western Australian secession and the feasibility of using a nuclear bomb to create a harbour on the north-west coast. Businessman and former NSW Liberal MP Michael Yabsley says the young Rinehart could be pleasant company, though her refusal to listen to views that differed from her own had a tendency to kill dinner-party conversation. "You'd wait for it to be derailed because she didn't like something that someone said," Yabsley says. "It was always pretty tense."

Rinehart was Hancock's eager apprentice, travelling the globe with him as he trained her to take over the mining behemoth he predicted Hancock Prospecting would become. He called her his "right-hand man" and addressed her as "young fella". At the same time, he expected her to be a decorative addition to business meetings. "He used to pick at her about her dress and her style and her behaviour," remembers an old family friend. "He used to

keep picking at her if she put on weight. He'd say, 'Where's my pretty girl?' " Much later, when father and daughter fell out over his marriage to Rose, Hancock taunted Rinehart about the kilos she had gained. In a vitriolic letter that surfaced during one of the court cases after his death, he said he wanted to remember her as the "neat, trim, capable and attractive young lady" she had been rather than "the slothful, vindictive and devious baby elephant that you have become".

Rinehart was only 18 when she married Greg Milton, a young Englishman who had worked in a Hancock-owned hardware store, in 1973. "I think Lang had higher hopes than Greg for Gina," says Gloria Schultz. Still, the groom was nothing if not malleable, even changing his surname to something closer to Hancock. (He picked Hayward, his grandmother's maiden name.) He later told Hancock biographer Debi Marshall he bitterly regretted that after the divorce he agreed to stay away from his children, John and Bianca, "to save them the confusion between their lifestyle and mine". Marshall says John was overcome with emotion when he learnt she had tracked down Milton, who had reverted to his original surname. She says John asked, "Can you put me in touch with Dad?"

Rinehart's next husband was an American tax attorney almost four decades her senior. Gina was 28 when the couple wed in Las Vegas in 1983. Frank Rinehart was 65. A search of US court records reveals that he had been convicted of tax fraud in 1977 - he received a one-year suspended jail sentence and was briefly barred from practising law. Nevertheless, Gina has described him as "the finest person I've ever known". Frank adopted John and Bianca, then he and Gina had their own children, Hope and Ginia. Until his death in 1990, he and the family divided their time between Australia and the US.

Frank has one surviving child from his previous marriage: Chris Rinehart, a flight instructor in Idaho. "Gina prefers the family not interact with the press," he emails. "I will respect her wishes and decline an interview."

John Singleton has a theory about Gina's marriage to Frank Rinehart, which took place the same year her mother died and her father, then 73, started an affair with Rose Lacson, a flamboyant 34-year-old from the Philippines who had been hired to look after his house. "I think it was just to get square," Singleton says. "If Lang's going to run off with a Filipina housekeeper, she's going to run off with an American geriatric ... He found a new daughter and she found a new dad." (The obvious flaw here is that Gina and Frank tied the knot three months before Rose took the job with Hancock.)

Rose was a seriously big spender who persuaded Hancock to outlay millions on the construction of a southern-plantation-style palace she called Prix d'Amour. She threw him parties, got him to dye his hair and, by most accounts, put a spring in his step. "I rather liked her," says long-time family friend Ron Manners. "I thought she was good for Lang." Rinehart loathed her, referring to her in a letter to Hancock as "a Filipina whore".

Father and daughter were reconciled before he died, but afterwards Rinehart went after his widow with all guns blazing, not only pursuing her for money and property but hiring private detectives to find evidence to support her belief that Rose had contributed to Hancock's death. Rinehart accused her stepmother of everything from swapping Hancock's medications to causing him lethal levels of stress, but an inquest held in 2001 as a result of her lobbying came to the same conclusion as previous inquiries: that the 82-year-old had died of natural causes.

What made headlines were courtroom revelations that Rinehart had paid potential witnesses (more than $200,000 in one instance). Coroner Alastair Hope spoke of gross irregularities in Rinehart's private investigation, and of the "potential corrupting effect on the evidence of witnesses", but did not recommend action. Jim McGinty, then attorney-general in the Labor state government, described the payments as "one of the most unsavoury and improper episodes ever seen in a Western Australian court".

Coroner Hope had heard evidence from a Hancock Prospecting director that Rinehart paid one person, Hilda Kickett, to stay away from the inquest. The daughter of an Aboriginal woman who worked on Hancock's family property, Mulga Downs, Kickett has long claimed that Hancock was her father.

Thanks partly to Rinehart's tireless efforts to promote his achievements, Hancock is regarded as something of a folk hero in Western Australia. As McGinty, now retired from politics, says, "In the west, there's an affection towards people who go out there and give it a go." Tim Treadgold makes the point that Rinehart too has given it a go: "She can be incredibly proud of her achievement in taking her inheritance and building substantially on it."

Yet in Perth, Rinehart seems to be a far less popular figure than her father. Michael Wright, the son of Hancock's late business partner, says of Lang, "He was a wonderful fella. Slightly mad, but I loved him dearly." Of Rinehart, who has been fighting him for years over aspects of the division of the partnership's spoils, he has nothing good to say. Her charitable gestures range from contributions to a cancer centre at St John of God Hospital in Subiaco to prizes for the best Christmas lights in Queensland coal towns. But some contend she is much less generous than others who have made billions digging minerals out of the West Australian desert. "She's unknown in

philanthropic circles," McGinty says. (Hancock wanted a cardiac institute established in the family's name but his finances were in disarray when he died and Rinehart successfully petitioned for his estate to be made bankrupt, which meant there was no money for the institute, nor anything for the handful of loyal friends and employees he had named as beneficiaries.)

Rinehart is "one of the most fascinating Australians of our time", says Fairfax journalist Adele Ferguson, whose book about her is due out in July. But from a distance, her life can look oddly unenviable. Newspapers reported in 1997 that Rinehart had reached a confidential out-of-court settlement with her former live-in security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her. In a long article in Woman's Day, Thompson said Rinehart became infatuated with him and wanted to marry him, despite his being engaged to someone else. "I told her over and over I wasn't interested," he said, but "she wouldn't take no for an answer". Thompson made plain that in some ways he felt sorry for Rinehart: "She's just incredibly lonely and isolated."

Singleton tells me Rinehart has no interests besides mining. "There is no social life," he says. "It's just work."

Rinehart and Singleton have something in common: both are big fans - and employers - of Andrew Bolt. Soon after Rinehart bought into Ten and got a seat on the board, the television network gave the right-wing newspaper columnist his own Sunday morning program. Bolt's voice is also heard on 2GB, the Sydney radio station that is majority-owned by Singleton and home to two of the country's most strident talk-back hosts, Alan Jones and Ray Hadley. Says Singleton, who shares Rinehart's views on mining and taxes: "We have been able to overtly and covertly attack governments ... Because we have people employed by us like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Ray Hadley who agree with her thinking about the development of our resources, we act in concert in that way."

Rinehart and her lobby group, Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision, have been campaigning for mining companies to be allowed to import cheap labour from overseas. In Jim McGinty's opinion, decent wages are one way the benefits of the mining boom can flow through the Australian community. "But Gina wants to cut even that off," he says incredulously. "I wonder, how many billions do you need, really, to be happy?"

Gloria Schultz has no doubt that her friend's motives are pure: "She really believes that mining and the money it brings are important to Australia. She's very patriotic." Asked if she thinks Rinehart is happy, Schultz hesitates. "Most of the time," she says. But a lot has been sacrificed in the name of the father. "It hasn't been an easy ride for Gina Rinehart."

In January of this year, Michelle McLaughlin lost her four-year-old son in an accident. She explains how the reporting of this tragedy in the media intensified the grief she and her family were feeling, and hopes her story can help reduce the trauma and pain of such a situation for others.

Our precious boy, Thomas McLaughlin – Tom – was tragically taken from us at Macmasters Beach in NSW on January 6, 2014. Tom was killed after taking two fatal steps onto the roadway from behind a parked car, in full view of his father, sister and grandparents.

Tom is our middle child. He had an electric little spirit, breathtaking smile and a real zest for life, and people were always drawn to him because of his outward enthusiasm, confidence, gentleness, kindness and joyful nature.

At 5.58pm on January 6, we were a happy family on our Christmas vacation; at 5.59pm we were a family torn apart. Emergency response crews arrived – fire, police then ambulance. Unfortunately, in that order.

People from the media were also among the first on the scene and, immediately on arrival, began approaching family members and eyewitnesses for comments, all of whom were experiencing absolute shock and extreme trauma. Their “reported” responses attest to this.

In the days that followed this tragic event, we were unaware of the ongoing television coverage, however we couldn’t escape the print media reporters who continually harassed us. The day after Tom’s accident, they turned up at our house and our neighbours’ houses, called our phones (landline and mobiles), sent letters, and contacted the director of Tom’s preschool.

As one media outlet printed the story, another would pick it up for reprint. In addition to this, any related story that occurred within a few weeks of Tom’s fatal accident would contain his name as a “baseline” filler. In my opinion, this “relational”

reporting is not only completely unnecessary, but caused a degree of confusion among readers about Tom and the circumstances of his unfortunate and untimely death. Every time we were faced with this reporting, whether directly or via friends and relatives, we were exposed to more pain and suffering, and our grief intensified as a result.

Before my seven-year-old daughter could return to school, the entire junior school had to be addressed by the principal to be given a factual account regarding Tom’s accident. This was to ensure she would not be potentially traumatised further by comments derived from non-factual and misleading reporting in print and on the internet.

Nothing is more tragic than the loss of any life, but the loss of a child’s life is felt by many to be the most tragic, for obvious reasons. Those left behind suffer and grieve for the rest of their days.

However, in our current society, tragedy sadly appears to be a commodity traded and sold within the media. It is a constant and staple ingredient of print, radio and television content and coverage.

Given that so much time and space is afforded to tragedy, I can’t help but wonder whether the purveyors of this topic ever stop to reflect on the benefit or harm resulting from this sort of coverage and the means in which it is gathered.

What I was witness to has left me with a lot of unanswered questions about today’s media:

Why do photographers (and their publishers) believe pictures of grieving family members are necessary? Do readers really want to see this pain and suffering? Has this been researched?

What motivation (and insensitivity) drove a reporter to give business cards to a distraught grandfather, requesting he pass them on to his son – whose own son had died within the past 30 minutes?

Why did reporters feel the need to knock on our door for interviews within days of the tragedy, and then to go and knock on the doors of our neighbours (many of whom had still not been informed of his death), schools and kindergartens?

The trauma and horror of what happened to Tom was intensified greatly for us by the media, and I believe it highlights a need to review the standards of practice relating to the reporting of deaths of minors following tragic circumstances.

In today’s modern world, there are many barriers of protection put in place to shield the innocent and the young. For example, preschool children cannot have pictures taken by a professional photographer unless parental consent is first obtained, and juvenile criminal offenders have their names withheld from the public. But it would appear there is no such protection for a young deceased child involved in a fatal accident or their grieving family.

It is my firm belief that it should be the families that choose whether or not the name or image of a child be used in such reporting. Interestingly, there does appear to be some level of respect in this regard in relation to the reporting of suicide.

I’m writing this piece in the hope that some publications may gain an insight into the pain and suffering they can potentially inflict and worsen for people who are already in a state of severe anxiety and immeasurable suffering. I want them to know this style of reporting on tragic events and the loss of life, particularly in cases where children are involved, can significantly heighten a person’s grief.

I sincerely hope that this article offers a different perspective and understanding of the impact of reporting on the death of a child in tragic circumstances. Sadly, there are and will continue to be many cases of children dying in devastating circumstances every year. And, equally, there will be parents like us who are completely heartbroken for the rest of their lives as a result.

Although Tom’s life has now tragically ended, we wholeheartedly believe that he can still achieve success in helping others. We have established the Tom McLaughlin Road Safety Memorial

Foundation, known as The Little Blue Dinosaur Foundation, to allow us to continue to care for Tom each day, and as a reflection of our great love for our son.

The primary aims of the foundation are to:

Champion the review of road safety within holiday towns, such as beach and rural hamlets, where infrastructure caters for residential populations, not seasonal population spikes

Advocate for change, specifically the introduction of safety improvements to holiday town (beach and rural hamlet) roadways, in the form of a specific and uniform set of traffic/road conditions that could fit these identified areas nationally

Produce and distribute age-specific literature to educate young children about road safety, specifically safety around differing roadway environments

Facilitate support services for families who have lost a child in sudden and tragic circumstances.

Not only do I hope that these measures can spare other families the loss of a precious child but, if the unthinkable happens, it is my sincere hope that a more heartfelt and sensitive approach to reporting such deaths may be considered in the future.

http://walkleys.com/michelle-mclaughlin-reporting-child-death/

The challenges of a female reporter in Pakistanjournalism, Nadia Sabohi, Pakistan, Women In Media Magazine

Nadia Sabohi, one of the first female TV journalists in the north-west Pakistan province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, tells of her life as a lone woman reporter in the most challenging of beats.

The horrible morning of Sunday, November 22, 2013, the Christian community of Peshawar was targeted by two consecutive suicide blasts at the All Saints Church Kohati, Peshawar.

I arrived there within 10 minutes of the incident. The scene in the church was very horrible. The walls and floor were coloured with human blood. Body pieces of victims were scattered within the church premises – men, women, elders and children were among them. Being a mother, I almost fainted when I saw the body pieces of little angels.

There was no space on the floor without blood to take a step. I was lined up to broadcast live by my TV channel and the beeps started. I was talking with the wounded, the families of victims, officials and community representatives, all live from the blast scene. This live transmission at the scene continued for almost six hours. It was difficult for me, with the victims’ families so upset as I walked around on the blood of their loved ones. Some became very rude and challenged me angrily. The next morning I went back to cover follow-up stories, and the situation was almost the same.

This is the story of just one terrorist attack in Peshawar, the frontline city in the war against terror. We report on two or three bomb blasts every single day. The terror attacks have been going on for as long as 12 years, when America invaded Afghanistan and kicked the Taliban government out. In the terrorised FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] region and Khyber Pakhtoonkha, media reporting is no game, even for the male reporters. Often when we rush to the blast scene, a second blast takes dozens or even hundreds of lives and many journalists are martyred.

For a female TV journalist, it is like being in a battlefield with enemies coming from all sides. In our society, and in the field of journalism, women may seem to be respected outwardly, but when we sit and discuss a report with a male colleague, they try to discourage us and cause problems.

It is because of this that women are hesitant about coming into this field and why some women leave. But nowadays the main problem is that we are worried about our safety – our lives. However it is encouraging that in a male-dominated society like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where there is a cultural barrier that prevents women from working, 30 per cent of journalists are women. Of those, 10 per cent work for TV channels, 7 per cent in newspapers and 13 per cent in local and international radio.

The fierce competition between media organisations puts journalists at even higher risk. In the case of a blast or any emergency, I have to break the news. This pressure usually makes me tense, but being a professional I have to prove that our channel is the best at breaking news.

But that’s hard. If I break the news of a blast, the channel I work for will demand that I find more casualties and a higher death toll, to compete with other organisations. The producer and director back at head office don’t understand how critical the situation is on the spot. They do not understand the problems of a reporter.

I always try to tell the real story, but obviously I am a human being and often my emotions as a mother, sister and wife overcome me. In Pakistan, our organisations prefer women journalists to cover these types of stories because we can bring a human touch. When I report on blast victims’ families, I try to make it real and show the problems they must face after the sudden death of a loved family member.

Training and education are very important for reporters. Media organisations need to arrange more and more training.

Another reality for women journalists in my province is that people here do not accept that we need to work in offices and go outdoors. In their opinion, women are not supposed to go outside and they are still not willing to accept our work identity.

During my 17 years’ experience as a journalist, I have had many male colleagues who have been narrow-minded [about working with women]. They will always criticise – “Oh, you did well but you did not mention this issue in your beeper” or “Oh, your story is not balanced”.

But I always dig out many breaking news stories and act professionally, for example, when visiting Peshawar Central Jail to do stories about Dr Shakil Afridi [the Pakistani physician who helped the CIA locate Osama bin Laden]. Because I am a woman, often they don’t take me seriously and offer me a cup of tea – but I am confident about being a professional woman and doing this. It also pains me that nowadays our organisations try to cash in on female journalists, using them to cover issues where the officials and authorities like having women journalists interview them.

In the current situation, the security risks and social pressures are the main problems for me as a female journalist. There is no doubt that males as well as females face many of these challenges in the field of journalism, but they do not hold them back. Each day I am not even sure that I will get home safely, but as a professional, no hurdle is too great.

Nadia Sabohi is an investigative reporter for Geo TV news in Pakistan, and their correspondent in Peshawar and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

http://walkleys.com/nadia-sabohi-women-journalists-pakistan/