Twiggy (4 page)

Regardless of Andrew’s misbehaviour, Don Forrest was a hard man to please. Years
later, even when Andrew Forrest had built Fortescue Metals Group into a mining powerhouse, Don was reluctant to tell his son he was proud of him. Forrest attributed his father’s stern approach to parenting to his own upbringing and contended that it was his strong mother who instilled in him a sense of self-belief.

Outside the boundaries of Minderoo, the landscape of the Pilbara was being
altered irrevocably during Forrest’s childhood. In November 1952, an eccentric Pilbara pastoralist and prospector called Lang Hancock had been flying his plane low, in blinding rain, through the Hamersley Ranges, about 200 kilometres inland from Minderoo, when he glanced down at the glistening rust-red rocks below. Suspecting the presence of iron ore, Hancock made a mental note of the location and
later returned to take samples. He soon came to realise he had discovered the world’s largest deposit of iron ore – more than 1 billion tonnes of the mineral.

But instead of trumpeting the find, Hancock and his business partner, Peter Wright, kept it a secret for almost ten years. At the time, the federal government had an embargo on exporting iron ore due to a mistaken perception that the
nation’s reserves were scarce, and Hancock was therefore unable to peg the tenements. He set about lobbying the government to lift the ban, which finally occurred in 1960. In truth, it had been known in geological circles since the late 1800s that it was likely the Pilbara contained a bounty of undiscovered iron ore. But it was only after World War II that the high cost of mining and shipping the
commodity – the key ingredient in modern steelmaking – could be justified by demand emanating from the booming economies of Japan, Europe and North America.

After furiously lobbying global companies to back them, Hancock and Wright eventually struck an eye-poppingly lucrative deal with London-based miner Rio Tinto, which handed them a 2.5 per cent royalty in perpetuity on every tonne of
iron ore exported from the Hamersley Ranges. Six decades later, that agreement would help propel Lang Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart, to the title of Australia’s richest person, overtaking Andrew Forrest on the
BRW
Rich List. Soon after the Rio Tinto deal was sealed in the early 1960s, new towns began springing up across the Pilbara as global capital poured in. The Pilbara’s population soared
tenfold and by August 1966 the first shipment of 52,000 tonnes of iron ore had left the newly built harbour at Dampier, bound for the steel mills of rapidly industrialising Japan.

The pace of construction was astonishing. It had been just nineteen months since Hamersley Iron – a joint venture between Rio Tinto and the US Kaiser Steel Corporation – had begun creating towns at Tom Price and
Dampier while building an open-cut mine, 320 kilometres of heavy-duty railway, two power stations and a deepwater port. By 1968, American company Bechtel Pacific had started producing iron ore at Mount Whaleback, in a lonely stretch of desert 400 kilometres from the coast in the eastern Pilbara. Soon taken over by mining giant BHP, Mount Whaleback now ranks as the world’s biggest open-cut iron ore
mine, a giant crater measuring five kilometres long, 1.5 kilometres wide and 430 metres deep.

The arrival of large-scale mining in the Pilbara inevitably caught the attention of the young Andrew Forrest, who had a glimpse of his future one day while passing the Cape Lambert iron ore plant near Karratha, about 200 kilometres north-east of Onslow. “We came across industry of sight and sound
I could never have imagined,” Forrest said in 2005. “And I just thought: what is this doing here? I thought the whole country revolved around sheep and cattle and hard yakka. I saw wealth on a scale which I found completely remarkable as a child. And I always wondered from that time on: how could you be involved in something like that?” Forrest would return to the Cape Lambert project as a seventeen-year-old
to gain his first taste of the mining industry, doing summer work as a process engineer’s assistant.

The rapid industrialisation of the Pilbara in the late 1960s created thousands of jobs for Australians and enriched shareholders and governments. But it did nothing for the original inhabitants of the ancient landscape. Aboriginal people have lived in the Pilbara for at least 30,000 years
and have a powerful, spiritual relationship with the land. Only in the past 140 years have they had to share the rugged country with white Australians. Yet when the deals between the state government of Sir David Brand and the international mining houses were drawn up to unearth the Pilbara’s bounty of iron ore, Aboriginal people were not even invited into the room. Not a cent in royalties was paid
to indigenous people, and the mining companies preferred to fly in labour from thousands of kilometres away rather than train local Aborigines. By the early 1980s, more than a decade after it opened, the huge Mount Whaleback mine had engaged just fifteen Aborigines. Whereas Aborigines had been long relied upon by pastoralists for their bush skills, they were virtually ignored by the emerging mining
industry.

In 1960s Australia, however, attitudes towards Aborigines in some quarters were beginning to change. The 1967 referendum that sought to remove clauses discriminating against Aborigines received an overwhelming 90 per cent “yes” vote across the nation. (Western Australia had the lowest percentage among the states, with an endorsement of 79 per cent – and this was much lower in most
rural areas.) A year earlier, the Federal Court had ruled that indigenous station hands should receive equal pay and conditions to their white counterparts – a decision that would have pleased Scotty Black and his fellow stockmen at Minderoo. Many pastoralists, however, were opposed to the judgment and sacked their Aboriginal workers. Historian Geoffrey Bolton summarised the devastating impact
of these sackings, which helped create the conditions for decades of social problems that have never been addressed in the Pilbara. “With little demand for their skills, limited job prospects, and legal access to alcohol,” he wrote, “these displaced Aboriginal communities faced daunting social problems beyond the imaginative grasp of most Western Australians.”

In Perth, David Brand and his
zealous minister for industrial development, Charles Court, remained staunchly opposed to any form of Aboriginal land rights even as the Pilbara mining industry flourished throughout the 1960s. Court’s hardline views were best illuminated in the infamous Noonkanbah dispute when he was premier in 1980 – an incident that marked a new low in the government’s relations with Aboriginal people. An American
drilling company, Amax, had applied to explore for oil at Noonkanbah pastoral station in the Kimberley region, to the north of the Pilbara. But the owners of the land, the Yungngora people, complained that their sacred sites would be disturbed and Amax was reluctant to enter without the landowners’ approval. Court, as premier, ended the stand-off by ordering a police-escorted convoy of forty-five
drilling rigs onto Noonkanbah, leading to violent clashes and noisy protests. His brazen approach was lauded by many, reflecting the prejudice prevalent in WA mining circles, and society generally, at the time. One avid supporter of Court’s stance was Lang Hancock, the father of the Pilbara iron ore industry, who appeared on television in the early 1980s to offer his views on how to solve “the
Aboriginal problem”. Hancock told
Today Tonight
he believed “no-good half-caste” Aborigines should be herded into one area and their waterholes poisoned so they could “breed themselves out”.

As a huge new industry sprung up around him in the Pilbara scrub, and while his Aboriginal mates continued to spend their days catching barramundi in the Ashburton River, the eight-year-old Andrew Forrest
flew out of Minderoo bound for one of Perth’s wealthiest boarding schools. Judy believes that sending all three of her children away from home at such young ages was the most emotionally wrenching part of station life. “It was always hateful, absolutely dreadful,” she recalled. “We’d all be glassy-eyed.”

Andrew’s elder brother, David, recalled the children’s pain of returning to Perth after
school holidays spent at Minderoo: “The last day, you’d try and get as much red dust in your hand and smear it all over you. And you’d have to get it all washed off, of course, because you’d be made to clean up to hop on the plane. But at least you could get it ingrained in your hand.”

As he flew out to Perth one day in the early 1970s, his pores full of red dirt, Andrew Forrest could have
had no idea how far his life’s journey would take him.

The wildest colts often make the best horses.

—KEN TREGONNING, former Hale School headmaster

With its sandstone buildings, lush lawns and Swan River frontage, Christ Church Grammar is the school of choice for Western Australia’s wealthy. It is Perth’s equivalent of Melbourne Grammar or Sydney’s Cranbrook, churning out educated
young men with a network of ready-made connections. And like those institutions, Christ Church tends to boast of the triumphs of its alumni. Among those to have worn the blue-and-gold school tie are former British Airways chief executive Rod Eddington, Western Australia’s chief justice Wayne Martin, national men’s hockey coach Ric Charlesworth, entrepreneur Peter Holmes à Court, renowned solo
yachtsman Jon Sanders, comedian Tim Minchin and the lead singer of rock band The Triffids, David McComb, who died in 1999.

Christ Church also likes to claim Andrew Forrest as one of its “old boys”, referring to him in school literature as a member of the class of 1978. In truth, however, Forrest never made it that far, and many at Christ Church were relieved to see the back of him when he
left abruptly in 1977.

Forrest arrived at Christ Church, in Perth’s old-money suburb of Claremont, in 1970 as an eight-year-old with a severe stutter that badly dented his self-confidence. “I always had the stutter, I grew up with it,” he later recalled. In fact, Forrest had inherited the disorder from his father Don. “I’m amazed he speaks so well now [because] he used to stammer at school
and at home,” Don Forrest said in 2007. “I was a stammerer and Andrew took it up.”

Forrest was placed in Walters boarding house, which fellow students of the era remember as a Dickensian place. There were ten to fourteen beds to a room, the mattresses were thin, the food was terrible and the spartan dormitories were icy-cold in winter. The bathrooms in the boarding house consisted of several
showers in a row, with no partitions and a highly unreliable supply of hot water. By the late 1970s some effort was being made to redress these privations. The school yearbook of 1977 – when Forrest was in Year 11 – records that the boarders’ common room had just been fitted with “carpet, curtains, heating and colourful posters, which all helped to make the room much more pleasant”. Christ Church
may have been expensive and prestigious, but clearly the boarders were not living in luxury.

Forrest’s boarding master at Walters house, Tony London, was a key figure among the staff at the school. He recalls that bullying was rife when he took over the boarding house, likening the environment to the savagery in William Golding’s classic
Lord of the Flies
. Younger pupils, he says, were forced
to be subservient to the senior boys, mainly the Year 12s, who had the power to decide how much the smaller boys could eat and to dish out tasks and punishment as they saw fit. Along with other senior staff, London introduced key reforms during Forrest’s time at Walters, including a smorgasbord which prevented the Year 12s from controlling the food. “Walters house had been run very loosely; the
boys had the run of the house,” he says.

The long-serving headmaster at Christ Church was Peter Moyes, a conservative educator who had won plenty of kudos for reviving the school’s fortunes. But, as one ex-student notes, Moyes was “well past his use-by date by the 1970s”. By all accounts, there was little room for freedom of expression and the cane was employed frequently to deal with all
forms of insubordination. If boarders left the school grounds on a Sunday, it was only after attending the compulsory 7am church service, and they were expected to wear the full uniform, including the blazer and tie.

One legendary sports teacher, Akos Kovacs, who died in 2012, was known for frequently striking students with his bare hands. During swimming lessons in the Swan River, Kovacs
would use a long pole to push boys into the water. Only if a hapless youth was close to drowning would Kovacs, an eastern European immigrant and World War II veteran, bring out the pole at the last second to save him.

Forrest’s brother, David, who is two years older, was ensconced in this harsh environment at Christ Church when Andrew arrived fresh from the Pilbara. David’s widely used nickname
at school was “Twig”, a play on the family name, but it would be several years before Andrew also came to be known by that moniker. In fact, he appears to have inherited it only after David left school; for Andrew, “Twig” may also have been a reference to his exceptionally scrawny physique as a youth. In the school annual of 1977, history of sorts was made when the name “Twiggy Forrest” was used
for the first time in relation to Andrew. It would be thirty years before it became the best known nickname in corporate Australia.

People recall Forrest as difficult and disruptive in class, rude to teachers and disliked by many of the boys at Christ Church. A more generous view is that he was a larrikin in a hostile environment who was deeply anxious and insecure because of his stutter
and desperately sad at being more than 1000 kilometres away from home. A former classmate, Rohan Pixley, says Forrest loved the land and was always talking to the other boys about his fondness for Minderoo. “Twiggy hated coming back to boarding school,” he says. “He would have wanted to be back up on the property.” One former student recalls Forrest taunting a fellow student who had a large nose
by calling him “Arrowhead”. “He used to put his hands over the top of his head to make an arrow shape every time the poor kid walked past him,” he says.

David Forrest has claimed publicly that Andrew was bullied by students and victimised by school authorities, referring to a “boomerang elbow” his brother still carried as a result of being pushed down the stairs by a teacher. But it’s difficult
to find anyone who can confirm that incident and David declined to be interviewed, saying Andrew would not allow him to speak. A number of those who were there at the time say Forrest instigated much of the violence in which he became involved. One former student, who is now a leading businessman in Perth and wants to remain anonymous, recalls: “He was very quick with his fists. He claimed to
have learned to fight from the Aboriginal kids on Minderoo station and he would fight in a way that put an end to the argument very quickly – a really hard punch to the nose or the eye, or both.”

Forrest wasn’t particularly popular at Christ Church and he was certainly not academically bright. He was enrolled in the lowest level of mathematics, known as Maths IV – proof that the future master
of financial markets was no whiz with numbers as a youth. Forrest’s main claim to fame around Christ Church appears to have been as a keen, and particularly aggressive, member of the school rugby team. He was also a decent swimmer from the moment he arrived. A photograph of the prep school swimming team from the 1973 school annual shows Forrest as a rake-thin eleven-year-old with pale skin and
a mop of sandy hair. Sitting casually with his arms crossed, he is almost reclining in his seat while the other boys make an effort to sit up straight.

David Forrest told journalist Mark Drummond in 2007 that one teacher at Christ Church had written on Andrew’s school report that it was lucky he had a sheep and cattle station to go back to because he wouldn’t amount to much in life. Over
time it has become accepted – by Forrest and many others – that Tony London was the author of that remark. But London, who was an English teacher as well as Forrest’s boarding master, rejects this, saying he would never have written such a remark and headmaster Peter Moyes would never have allowed it on any student’s report.

London has also heard talk over the years that Forrest blames him
for his deep unhappiness at Christ Church. “He was a very unhappy boy – I felt sorry for him,” says London, who ran into Forrest in 2007 and finally made peace with him, telling him he had achieved much more than anyone had expected. Like many others at Christ Church at the time, London is adamant that Forrest brought on much of the bullying he received. “Andrew divided people one way or the other
and he would say things which would stir people up,” he says. “He said he was bullied and I believe that was the case. Unfortunately, people who are bullied sometimes attract it.”

Then one day towards the end of the 1977 school year, Forrest was gone. It’s not entirely clear whether he was asked to leave Christ Church or whether his parents decided he’d been in enough trouble and needed
a fresh start. Either way, his abrupt departure appears to have been precipitated by his decision to pick a fight with a bigger student called John Weatherhead. “He was fighting one morning and he was gone from school that afternoon,” says one student who was in Forrest’s year at Christ Church.

Weatherhead says he clearly recalls the events of that day – and he still sports a small scar above
his right eye as a reminder of the young Twiggy’s punching ability. “I was standing at the top of the stairs when Forrest, who was down below with a group of mates, looked up at and yelled out, ‘Poofter!’ I was quite shocked because I’d never even met the guy. And then it escalated. I said, ‘Come here and say that,’ and he said ‘Poofter!’ again. There was some pushing and shoving and then punches
started flying. I copped one in the eye, which needed a stitch, but the only other recollection I have of the fight is I had his blazer over his head and I had him on the edge of the steps. I was in two minds – I thought, I could just push him down here. It was a split-second thing. I thought, I will hurt the guy too bad. That’s when he came up with a blind left hook, because he had his jacket
over his head. Then it got broken up by teachers.”

Weatherhead says he bears no malice towards Forrest and the pair have been friendly towards each other during a few chance encounters around Perth since school days. “After our encounter, he always gave me the impression he felt somewhat remorseful and wanted to make amends, even years later when we ran into each other,” he says.

Another
former student, Bruce “Jock” Strapp, has a different recollection of the brawl that appears to have been the final straw for Forrest’s teachers and parents. Strapp says he was walking down the stairs with Forrest when Weatherhead made a joke about Forrest’s stutter. In itself, that was unsurprising to Strapp because students would regularly make fun of Forrest.

After his abrupt departure
from Christ Church towards the end of Year 11, Forrest was enrolled at Hale School the following year to fulfil what must have been his parents’ fervent wish for their wayward son to complete his secondary education. One of the state’s oldest and most illustrious schools, Hale is set over forty-eight hectares in Wembley Downs, one of the many comfortable and serene suburbs that lie between Perth’s
CBD and the sapphire waters of the Indian Ocean. Like most private boys’ schools, Hale has an integral focus on sport. These days, the campus includes an Olympic-sized heated swimming pool, sixteen tennis courts, four football fields, five cricket ovals, four soccer pitches and a gymnasium with basketball, badminton, volleyball, squash and rock-climbing facilities.

Hale’s list of alumni
is possibly even more impressive than Christ Church’s. The school has produced six premiers of Western Australia (including Sir John Forrest), thirteen Rhodes scholars and a bevy of prominent musicians, artists, scientists and captains of industry. Hale is nowhere near as blue-blooded as Christ Church; its location in Wembley Downs, slightly north of Perth’s wealthiest enclaves, means it draws more
students from the city’s middle-class suburbs.

When Andrew Forrest arrived at Hale as a boarder in early 1978, with a reputation for pugilism and poor marks, he would have been viewed as the one of the least likely candidates to follow in the footsteps of the school’s famous graduates. Forrest appears to have been extraordinarily lucky that Hale took him in at all. The school’s former long-serving
headmaster, Ken Tregonning, reveals that Forrest’s father, Don, an old friend and a Hale alumnus, approached him personally to ask whether he could enrol his son to repeat Year 11. He admits he didn’t ask Don too many questions about why Andrew had left Christ Church. “I didn’t want to pry,” he says. “I said ‘yes’ because he [Andrew] was the son of an old boy and I was good friends with
Don.”

Tregonning, a keen historian, was well aware that the Forrest clan had a long association with Hale, dating back to the education of John, Alexander and David Forrest. These days, Twiggy’s only son, Sydney, is a student at Hale and Forrest is recognised as a generous donor to the school. In 2009 he was invited to open the Forrest Library, which was named in recognition of the family’s
association with Hale and was the beneficiary of a fat cheque from Forrest. That same year, the school magazine lauded Forrest alongside fellow old boys such as Wesfarmers chief executive Richard Goyder and former WA Liberal treasurer Christian Porter as examples of alumni who had “seized the day” and achieved great things. “They are the sorts of people who haven’t been too tired when things were
a bit hard and they definitely didn’t put things off until tomorrow,” the magazine said.

The move to Hale was the seminal event in the young Andrew Forrest’s life. “There was no way if he stayed at Christ Church that he was going to pass Year 12,” says former classmate Rohan Pixley. “Hale deserves a lot of credit for that.” Tregonning, as headmaster, appears to have played a central role
in the transformation of the sixteen-year-old Forrest. “The wildest colts often make the best horses,” says Tregonning, now comfortably retired in the posh Perth suburb of Peppermint Grove. “I used to relish boys who were in trouble. Often all they need is encouragement, guidance and praise, and they will come good.”

One morning quite early in Forrest’s time at Hale, Tregonning decided to
stroll across to the school pool before breakfast to watch the swimming squad train for the upcoming Public Schools Association carnival, a prestigious event on the calendar of Perth’s private boys’ schools. But Forrest hadn’t turned up to the early-morning training session, prompting an angry headmaster to storm over to the boarding house and wake the youth from his slumber. For Forrest, the image
of an irate white-haired headmaster in his dressing gown at the foot of his bed at 6am seems to have been a proverbial light-bulb moment. “He told me long after that it was the first time somebody had ever really wanted him,” Tregonning recalls.