From mega carbon emitter to … eco-warrior? What drives Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest

This story is part of Good Weekend’s best cover stories of 2022.See all 13 stories.

Andrew Forrest is sitting at the head of a long dining table in his gracious old house in the Perth beachside suburb of Cottesloe. He has just returned from a meeting in the city with Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia – a meeting at which Forrest discussed contributing to the cost of rebuilding the war-torn country. His mood is upbeat. He points out that he passed up lunch with the ambassador in order to keep his promise to eat with me. “This is Grace, by the way,” he says, as a young woman bearing food approaches. “Been with us forever. Champion.”

Grace sets down the plates and explains what is on them: ricotta-stuffed zucchini flowers topped with salmon roe and honey vinaigrette. “Wow,” says Forrest who, at 60, has grey curly hair and a round, weathered face. In photographs, his hooded blue eyes can look calculating. In person, he is chatty and engaging. Grace heads back to the kitchen and returns with another dish: spiced mulloway fillet with lemon and anchovy dressing on a bed of vegetables. The sumptuousness of the repast, the size and elegance of the room, the presence of the loyal family retainer … I feel like I’m in an episode of Downton Abbey: Down Under. Grace hovers for a minute, checking that everything is in order before she withdraws. “Thanks, darl,” says Forrest. “Perfect!”

In May, The Australian Financial Review estimated Forrest’s fortune at $30.72 billion, putting him in second spot on the masthead’s annual list of the country’s richest people (after fellow iron-mining magnate Gina Rinehart). In the 12 months to June 2021, his Fortescue Metals Group made a net profit of $14 billion, of which it paid $11 billion in dividends to shareholders. Forrest owns 36 per cent of the company, so he took home $4 billion. That’s the equivalent of $77 million a week, or $11 million a day.

Keep in mind that, like most mineral deposits, the iron ore Fortescue extracts from the Western Australian desert and sells for enormous sums to Chinese steel-makers theoretically belongs to the state. Fortescue holds licences to mine it. Back in 2010, Kevin Rudd’s federal Labor government announced its intention to introduce a tax on mining companies’ “super profits”. The aim was to deliver to the nation’s coffers an increased proportion of the astronomical earnings from digging up and shipping out our non-renewable resources.

The plan was foiled thanks in part to vigorous campaigning by Forrest, whose wealth had been estimated at $9.4 billion when he topped the rich list two years earlier. That he was able to help swing public opinion against the tax, claiming it would be an intolerable burden on him and other miners, attests not only to the skill of his spin doctors and his own powers of persuasion but to the willingness of Australians to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Twiggy, as he is known to everyone but his family and friends – who call him Andrew – has always presented himself as a knockabout bloke made good, the maverick entrepreneur who took on the multinational mining behemoths, BHP and Rio Tinto, and won. His popularity is boosted by his highly publicised philanthropy. He and his wife, Nicola, through their Minderoo Foundation, have invested $2.6 billion in programs with such worthy goals as ridding the oceans of plastic waste, broadening access to high-quality early-childhood education and ending the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

In the past couple of years, Forrest has won more fans by becoming a climate activist and throwing himself into the race to substitute clean energy for global-warming fossil fuels. He’s a kind of folk hero. The big-hearted business baron. The lovable billionaire.

To some of us, Forrest is a puzzle. Why put all that effort into killing the mining tax if he was going to give away so much money anyway?

Not everyone sees him that way, of course. To some of us, Forrest is a puzzle. Why put all that effort into killing the mining tax if he was going to give away so much money anyway? If he genuinely cares about Aboriginal people, why hasn’t he paid compensation to the traditional owners of some of the land Fortescue mines? If he’s so worried about climate change, why does he head a mining company that pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? In short, what motivates this guy?

By the day of our lunch, I have been studying Forrest for months, on and off. I have interviewed people who know him well. I have spent time with the man himself. Toured his offices. Travelled with him by helicopter and in his chauffeured car. What’s become clear is that Andrew Forrest is a more complicated character than Twiggy, his public persona. I’ve learnt, too, that Forrest works hard at image management. From the beginning, he’s done his best to control the way he’s portrayed in this story, telling me for instance that before publication he wants to read all remarks attributed to him so he can be certain he hasn’t been misquoted or misinterpreted. When that proposal is rejected, he contents himself with giving editorial directions as we go along. “That’s off the record,” he will interrupt himself to say. Or: “Don’t put that in the article please, babe.”

Terms of endearment trip off his tongue. Expletives occasionally slip into his conversation too, and he worries that they will look bad on the page. Hearing himself use the phrase “tough little bastard”, he pauses and asks me to leave it out of the piece: “No swear words please, angel.” When in due course another mild profanity escapes his lips, he reminds me to expunge it from the record: “I think we’ve agreed, no swear words.” I reply that actually I haven’t agreed to that. “I know I can rely on you,” he says.

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Does anyone accidentally become a billionaire? Forrest reckons that’s what happened to him. His version of events is that he created a successful business, Fortescue, and whoops, next thing he knew he was absolutely rolling in it. “I’ve set out to make a difference, to be useful with my short life,” he says as we eat our zucchini flowers. “I haven’t set out to become wealthy.”

Nichola Garvey, the person he commissioned to write his biography a decade ago, came away with a different view. In an article written for her PhD and published in 2020, Garvey discusses her up-and-down relationship with her subject in the years she worked on the book – which never saw the light of day – and offers her opinion on what makes him tick. Central to his story, she writes, is “money – how it has motivated Forrest, his acuity in the employment of capital, how he uses it to manipulate people by withholding and promising it and his absolute obsession with it, despite all of his declarations to the contrary.”

Whether he got here by mistake or design, being crazy-rich makes Forrest powerful. With a higher net wealth than some nations (Mozambique, Mongolia, the Bahamas), he is increasingly a player on the world stage, jetting between meetings with business and government leaders in Fortescue’s Bombardier Global 7500 (price: about $100 million). When not cutting international deals, he moves around his home country – and strolls its parliamentary corridors – as if wearing an access-all-areas VIP pass.

“Andrew can knock on pretty much any door he wants and it will open for him,” says Tony Worby, head of Forrest’s marine research program, Flourishing Oceans. “If we want to influence or lobby someone, then chances are we will get access to them.”

Some wonder why Forrest hasn’t stood for office, given he’s an instinctive mover-and-shaker. “He’s too smart for that,” says former business partner Warwick Grigor. “I think he realises he can control the politicians, like Rupert Murdoch would do, without having to be in the firing line himself.”

Andrew and Nicola Forrest tour an R.M. Williams workshop in Adelaide. They bought it in 2020. Credit: David Mariuz

Parliamentarians of all stripes fall over themselves to be photographed with the Twigster, especially when he’s making crowd-pleasing announcements. That he will build a plant at Gladstone, on the central Queensland coast, that leads the world in manufacturing electrolysers, used in producing green hydrogen, for instance. That he has shelled out $190 million for boot-maker R.M. Williams, returning the 90-year-old firm to Australian ownership.

Forrest functions almost as an extra arm of government – endowing universities, financing cancer research, distributing grants to artists, supplying temporary housing to communities razed by bushfires. And so on.

Keeping tabs on all the projects he funds can’t be easy. One afternoon in Perth we are scheduled to visit Forrest Hall, which accommodates outstanding young academics awarded scholarships by the Forrest Research Foundation. I say I’m looking forward to seeing the new building – Forrest Hall stage 2 – that’s gone up next to the original on the University of Western Australia campus. “It’s a construction site, angel,” Forrest advises.

He often speaks with exuberant fondness of those employed in the various realms of Forrestworld. “You go from group to group and you don’t know who to love more,” he says.

But when we arrive, there’s no sign of wet cement or scaffolding: the place looks ready for occupation. Pleasantly surprised, Forrest has a quick tête-à-tête with Paul Johnson, formerly the university’s vice-chancellor and now Forrest Hall’s warden. After the two men part, Forrest says of Johnson: “What a darling.”

He often speaks with exuberant fondness of those employed in the various realms of Forrestworld. “You go from group to group and you don’t know who to love more,” he says. By most accounts, though, he is a hard taskmaster, expecting the 15,000 people on his payroll to be as dedicated to furthering his interests as he is. “He’s very tough and very demanding,” says Andrew Hagger, chief executive of both the Minderoo Foundation, and Forrest’s and Nicola’s family company, Tattarang. “I’d say he’s the toughest person I’ve met.”

The volatility of the iron ore market means Forrest’s income from Fortescue varies dramatically from year to year. And China, the world’s biggest iron ore consumer, could push prices permanently lower if, as mooted, it sets up a centralised purchasing agency. Not to worry, though. The breadth of Tattarang’s investments ensures that money rolls steadily in Forrest’s door.

The company is involved in everything from agriculture and property development to tourism, renewable energy generation and food production. Whenever you look up, Forrest is expanding his empire. Buying Lizard Island, on the Great Barrier Reef. Becoming the largest shareholder in Bega Cheese, the groceries manufacturer whose brands include Pura, Farmers Union and Vegemite. Adding to his collection of vast WA cattle stations. Pouring more capital into the $30 billion Sun Cable project, which will deliver solar power from the Northern Territory to Singapore.

Why not go to Lizard Island and lie on the beach for a while? Evidently, Forrest isn’t wired that way. Hagger tells me that when Tattarang bought an oyster business, company executives “had in mind that maybe in three or four years’ time, we could sell 150,000 oysters. Andrew said, ‘I have in mind 18 million.’ ” Hagger laughs. “Your first thought is, ‘That’s ridiculous. Impossible. This is the Akoya oyster, a new product for Australia.’ But when he says those things, he means them.”

The scale of Forrest’s ambition both exhilarates and exhausts those around him. “We’ll wait and see how many oysters we end up being able to sell around the world in 2025, but I can tell you it will be a lot more than 150,000,” Hagger says, adding jokingly that he hopes the number is 18 million because that way he will keep his job. He recalls an exchange he had with an executive who worked closely with Forrest on a four-month contract. When the term ended, Hagger asked the executive how it went. “He said to me, ‘I now realise there’s no element of luck in being a billionaire. He is completely relentless.’ ”

Forrest throws the first shovel-load of iron ore onto a China-bound ship in 2008. Credit: Erin Jonasson

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There are five passengers in the chopper: Forrest, three of his female staffers and me. He leans forward and says in a conspiratorial tone, “Between us girls …” His voice is softer than might be expected of someone with his big personality but the lack of volume works in his favour: you find yourself paying keen attention to his every word. He touches you on the arm to emphasise a point, sometimes speaks directly into your ear as if imparting a secret to a confidante. He is intense yet amiable, with a habit of half-smiling while he talks – traits that would be appealing in anyone but somehow seem even more winsome in a plutocrat. (So rich! Yet so friendly!)

The helicopter lands at the Liddell power station in the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney. Forrest alights. On this mild summer morning, he is wearing a caramel-coloured leather jacket, a linen shirt and faded jeans with a couple of patched holes in them. On his wrist is a chunky gold watch. On his feet are R.M. Williams boots, natch. He is here to declare his interest in developing a green-hydrogen plant on the site of the coal-fired power station, which is owned by AGL Energy and scheduled to close in 2023.

Workers in high-vis gear gather round as he is introduced by Matt Kean, then energy and environment minister for the Liberal state government, as “one of the most visionary leaders that we have in the nation”. Forrest gives a speech that is at once rousing and reassuring, telling the Liddell staff they needn’t fear the end of the coal era: the transition to clean energy will create thousands of jobs and boundless opportunities. “Here in the Hunter, I want to be your brother,” he says. “I want to work with you.”

When in 2020 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation board invited Forrest to deliver the Boyer Lectures – an honour bestowed each year on a distinguished Australian – he called the first of his talks Confessions of a Carbon Emitter. Pollution of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide, a by-product of burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), is the main cause of climate change. The iron and steel sector is responsible for about 9 per cent of global emissions of greenhouse gases – so-called because they trap heat on the earth’s surface – and Forrest’s Fortescue is the world’s fourth-largest iron ore producer. In the year to June 2021, the company burned 700 million litres of diesel fuel and released 2.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, 7 per cent more than the year before.

It takes real chutzpah, when you’ve made a mountain of money at the expense of the environment and are continuing to do more than your fair share to cook the planet, to put yourself forward as a green crusader. But that is precisely Forrest’s position. He claims that when he founded Fortescue in 2003, and for years afterwards, he didn’t realise that global warming was such a serious problem. In any case, he says, someone has to mine iron ore: it’s the main ingredient in steel, which is an indispensable construction material. That someone may as well be him. At the same time, he acknowledges the urgent need to figure out how to power mining and heavy industry without putting further upward pressure on temperatures. Again, someone has to do it. “And I just think, ‘If not me, then who?’ ”

Hydrogen can be produced by running an electric current through water: the zapped water molecules split into their two components, hydrogen and oxygen. If the electricity used in the process is generated from renewable sources such as solar or wind power, the product is called green hydrogen. Forrest is convinced this is the fuel of the future: whether combusted in engines, or converted to electricity by a device known as a fuel cell, it generates no harmful emissions.

Hope is in the air. A worker says to another: “The future sounds rosy if it all comes true.”

“Green-hydrogen energy will be the largest industry in the world,” he says at Liddell, where refreshments have been laid out in a hall. In man-of-the-people mode, he circulates with a plate, offering pieces of cake and spreading Twiggy magic. Later, he swings his arms around the shoulders of anyone within reach and poses for happy snaps with the belching towers of the power station in the background. Hope is in the air. A worker says to another: “The future sounds rosy if it all comes true.”

Watching from the sidelines, I’m aware that the melting of the polar ice caps isn’t all that concerns Forrest. There’s also the question of where he’ll be photographed for this story. A shoot in a studio holds no appeal for him. “Can we do it natural and outside, darl?” he’s asked. He wants the pictures to reflect who he really is: “A country boy!”

He may spend more time on corporate jets than on horseback these days, but the fact that he hails from the wide open spaces is an important part of Andrew Forrest’s mystique. He likes to remind us that the red dust of the outback is deep in his pores – that even when he’s sporting a dapper navy suit, his mindset is that of a man in moleskins.

After meeting US President Joe Biden at COP26, the UN climate conference in Glasgow last November, Forrest accepted an invitation to visit the White House to continue the conversation about green energy. Describing how he felt as he entered the West Wing in April, he says: “Ex-jackaroo. Kid from the bush. So fortunate to be able to do this.”

Describing how he felt when he visited the West Wing, Forrest says: “Ex-jackaroo. Kid from the bush. So fortunate to be able to do this.” Credit: Nic Walker

Not that he grew up in a bark hut. Forrest is a descendant of the squattocracy. His childhood home, Minderoo Station, in the Pilbara region of northern Western Australia, is a 2300-square-kilometre pastoral property that came into his family in the 1870s, acquired by two go-getter brothers. The oldest, explorer John Forrest, became the first WA premier and a foundation member of the federal parliament. Statues of John and his brother Alexander, also an explorer turned politician, stand in central Perth. A third brother, Andrew’s great-grandfather David, ran Minderoo. “He used to sleep with a revolver under his pillow,” says Forrest, “which is kind of a scary way to sleep.”

Even in 1961, when Forrest was born, the isolation of life on the property could mess with the head. His mother Judy once told an interviewer that when she learnt she was pregnant with Andrew, the youngest of her and Don Forrest’s three children, she was so dismayed that she tried to induce a miscarriage by riding bareback across the Minderoo sandhills and jumping off a roof onto the tennis court.

“I couldn’t believe Mum just blurted that out,” says Forrest, who dismisses the theory held by some of his old friends that his character was shaped by determination to prove his worth to Judy. What did affect him profoundly in his formative years, he says, was a debilitating stutter. “The more I needed to speak, the more I stuttered, until I could not speak at all.”

As a senior boarder at Perth’s Hale School, which has produced six WA premiers (including John Forrest), he took a crash-or-crash-through approach and signed up for his house debating team. The weekly debates were like gladiatorial battles, he says. “Everyone would pile in, standing room only, waiting for the kids to make fools of themselves.” He survived – “we actually won the debating that year” – and, though the stutter lingered for several years, he went on to become a whiz-kid stockbroker.

“We’re able to say we are the green-energy company of Europe … We’ve got the agreement with Germany, the agreement in Britain, the agreements in France.”

After the 1987 sharemarket crash, 26-year-old Forrest moved from Perth to Sydney, where he made a name as a sharp and aggressive operator. “He always had the bravado,” says Warwick Grigor, with whom he started an investment bank, Far East Capital, in 1991. According to Grigor, Forrest also had a sincere desire to be rich. “He said, ‘Warwick, let’s have a five-year target. We’ll make $5 million in five years.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’d be nice,’ but I was never as focused on money as he was.”

At around this time, Forrest crossed paths with respected business journalist Michael West. It was a Friday night in Sydney’s Kings Cross, West later wrote, and Forrest was riding a Harley-Davidson, helmetless, with a female stockbroking analyst as his pillion passenger. “He was in high spirits, though not as high as they would become before the evening concluded around 4am,” continued West, who over the years has had criticisms of Forrest but has always given him points for panache. When Forrest vaulted over the usual contenders to the top of the 2008 rich list, West wrote, “There was joy in the newsroom. ‘Twiggieee.’ ”

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Fearless, flamboyant and, frankly, a lot of fun, Forrest has long been a media darling. In the lead-up to the climate talks in Glasgow, his attention-getting stunts included painting a fleet of London taxis green and emblazoning them with the logo of Fortescue’s clean-energy subsidiary, Fortescue Future Industries (FFI). So splashy and schmoozy was his presence at the conference, you’d have been forgiven for thinking he alone had a plan to save the world.

He tells me with a straight face that he tries to avoid personal publicity – “It was like removing my teeth with pliers to get me to do the New York Times story” – yet he pops up in one publication or TV program after another and cultivates relationships with key media personnel. (Guests at a dinner he hosted at the upmarket Sydney restaurant Rockpool late last year included journalists and executives from Nine, publisher of Good Weekend.)

Known for his media stunts, Forrest arranged for a fleet of London taxis to be painted green, with the logo of his clean-energy subsidiary, before last year’s climate talks in Glasgow.Credit:

Forrest has recruited some heavy hitters to the FFI team. With him in Glasgow was former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, chairman of the company’s Australian division. Nick Warner, former director-general of Australia’s peak intelligence agency, is special adviser on international affairs. Guy Debelle, previously deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, has joined as chief financial officer.

Forrest, who has promised to neutralise emissions from Fortescue’s own operations by 2030, says FFI will produce 15 million tonnes of green hydrogen annually by the same year, and will begin supplying the fuel to customers within three years. He has signed non-binding agreements with a range of prospective clients, including Germany’s largest electricity utility company, E.ON. “We’re able to say we are the green-energy company of Europe,” he tells an FFI staff meeting I attend. “We’ve got the agreement with Germany, the agreement in Britain, the agreements in France.” To the workers at Liddell, he says: “Fortescue is a world leader in hydrogen.”

Here’s the thing, though. Despite the best efforts of companies around the globe, green hydrogen remains more a concept than a reality. An excellent concept, say those working feverishly to find a way to produce it at an affordable price on a commercial scale. But not yet an actual, marketable product. As for FFI, which has close to 1000 employees – “We haven’t made a jerry-can of the stuff,” Forrest says breezily. “But we know how to do it. We have the best physicists, the best engineers. We know we’ve got huge challenges along the way, which we’re resolving.”

Not all share his confidence. The Australian’s resources reporter Nick Evans has written that green hydrogen could make Forrest this country’s first trillionaire: “Or FFI could just fall over one afternoon in a puff of logic, when the engineers finish their sums.” Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of software giant Atlassian and Forrest’s partner in the Sun Cable project, recently told the US magazine Forbes: “That’s what we love about him. He’s six parts moxie, seven parts bullshit and some part of it’s going to come true …”

“That’s what we love about him. He’s six parts moxie, seven parts bullshit and some part of it’s going to come true …”

For Forrest, going out on a limb must feel familiar. He told investors in his first mining company, Anaconda Nickel, that a whiz-bang new process called high-pressure acid leaching would cheaply extract nickel from low-grade ore. In that instance, there were major technical problems. Production targets were missed, the company’s share price collapsed and Forrest was forced out of the chief executive’s office in 2001.

Business writers use words like “debacle” and “disaster” when referring to Anaconda. Forrest refuses to accept their verdict. “Anaconda was incredibly successful,” he insists. “There was no reason to sack me, because I’d done a great job.”

I’ve read that the episode left his reputation in tatters, making it difficult to attract backers for his next high-risk venture, Fortescue. Forrest flatly denies this, too. “Just bullshit folklore,” he tells me at the lunch table, as Grace brings coffee and freshly made biscotti. “Thanks, Gracie,” he says. “You legend.”

In a lift at the Minderoo Foundation headquarters, which overlook Perth’s Swan River, Forrest and I run into his wife, Nicola. “Hey, sexy-legs,” he says by way of greeting. Nicola, 61, is co-chair of the foundation and works closely with former South Australian Labor premier Jay Weatherill, chief executive of its Thrive By Five division, which campaigns for universal access to early-learning programs.

The Forrests, who have three children – Grace, 28, Sophia, 27, and Sydney, 22 – were the first Australians to sign The Giving Pledge, following the example of US billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in promising to part with at least half their wealth during their lifetime. Andrew has since gone further, saying their long-term goal is to “give away everything but the personal things and the goods and chattels”.

A philanthropy-sector observer says they might need to get a wriggle-on: to dispose of, say, 80 per cent of their wealth in the three decades before Forrest turns 90, they will have to unload it at a rate of about $1 billion a year. In the year to June 2021, the Forrests put $500 million into their foundation but it spent only (only!) $110 million on donations and its own philanthropic programs.

Andrew and Nicola Forrest have signed The Giving Pledge, a global movement in which billionaires like Bill Gates pledge to give away at least half of their wealth in their lifetimes.

Forrest’s charitable impulse contrasts oddly with the parsimony Nichola Garvey witnessed when, as his chosen biographer, she was part of his retinue. He would let others take care of restaurant bills, she writes, and if he did pick up the tab, made sure to point it out:  “‘I paid for the banana bread,’ he once said at a cafe inside Parliament House in Canberra.”

Garvey likes Forrest despite his foibles, and acknowledges that his creation of Fortescue is one of the most remarkable feats in Australian corporate history. The company exports more than 180 million tonnes of iron ore a year from its own deepwater port at Port Hedland, on the Pilbara coast, which is connected via 760 kilometres of purpose-built heavy-haul railway to its three mining hubs in the Pilbara. It employs 11,500 people and, in the year to June 2021, paid $5.8 billion in tax along with $2 billion in government royalties.

Forrest built this mammoth operation from scratch, having accurately predicted the boom in demand for iron ore resulting from the rise of China (the country that provides 90 per cent of Fortescue’s revenue). From the outset, he maximised his mines’ profitability by ruthlessly keeping costs down. His staff would drive hard on pricing when negotiating with suppliers, Garvey writes, and then when the suppliers thought an agreement had been reached, Forrest would demand a further price drop of 5 or 10 per cent.

When he topped the 2008 rich list, his fortune was not only the biggest Australia had seen, but the fastest accrued. “People don’t get rich this quickly by being nice to other people,” observed business communications consultant Mark Westfield. Says a senior mining industry figure who knows Forrest well: “There are a lot of people he’s burnt along the way, a lot of people who would never work for him again, a lot of people who think he’s a total arsehole.”

The Forrests with their children: Grace, Sophia and Sydney.Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Forrest

In the prize-winning unauthorised 2013 biography Twiggy, author Andrew Burrell noted that in the course of Forrest’s career, four judges in four separate court cases had questioned his honesty. In the first case, arising from a falling-out with a partner in an alpaca breeding scheme in the early 1990s, a Federal Court judge said Forrest had demonstrated he would resort to “threats and falsehoods” to achieve his commercial ends. (Forrest won the case on appeal.)

In the second case, a Perth magistrate found Forrest had acted “unethically” and “immorally” to secure ownership of some mining tenements for Anaconda Nickel. In the third case, in 2001, triggered by a business dispute with Melbourne mining entrepreneur Joseph Gutnick, a Victorian Supreme Court judge described Forrest as “an untruthful witness”.

The following year, in a case brought by Canadian investment bankers who claimed Anaconda owed them money, a NSW Supreme Court justice echoed the Victorian judge’s words, saying he regarded Forrest as “quite untruthful”. Then the Australian Securities and Investments Commission went after Forrest, alleging he had misled Fortescue investors by giving the impression the company had firm contracts with Chinese state-owned construction companies when in fact the agreements were non-binding. The case went all the way to the High Court, where Forrest won against the corporate watchdog in 2012.

Unpleasant legal stoushes seem a distant memory now that Forrest and Nicola are Australia’s most celebrated benefactors. The tax-deductibility of charitable donations means their generosity significantly reduces their tax bill: in effect, the Australian government subsidises their support of their chosen causes. But the Minderoo Foundation’s Andrew Hagger says the couple’s motivation is pure and simple: “They want to make the world a better place.”

In philanthropy, as in oyster-farming, Forrest thinks big. A decade ago, he declared his intention to eradicate modern slavery (defined as including forced labour and forced marriage). In 2014, he founded the Global Freedom Network, gathering an impressive array of world religious leaders at the Vatican to join him and Pope Francis in signing a pledge to work to end slavery. It was a public relations triumph for Forrest, establishing him as an international-league do-gooder – even if the Pope’s representative on the network’s board, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, resigned less than a year later, possibly less convinced than Hagger that self-promotion had no place on the tycoon’s agenda.

“We do not want to be used,” Sorondo was quoted as telling Italian newspaper La Stampa. “A businessman has the right to make money, but not by using the Pope.” (Forrest describes this as “a sad, unsubstantiated remark”.)

Forrest had earlier made headlines by announcing a plan to free more than 2 million people from slavery in Pakistan. He said he had undertaken to give its state of Punjab free access to new technology capable of converting its lignite coal deposits into diesel fuel, thereby stabilising its energy supply and boosting its economy. In return for the coal conversion technology, which was being developed by Perth’s Curtin University, Punjab’s government would introduce anti-slavery regulations.

After the fanfare died down, the deal fell through. Forrest tells me the Pakistanis were to blame: “But for the will of the government, it would have happened.” In a carefully worded email, a Curtin University spokesperson gives a different explanation: “The technology required a significant additional investment to make it commercially viable. Curtin was unable to secure this investment.” The university discussed the project with Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation, the spokesperson says, but “no agreement was reached”.

Launching an anti-slavery drive with the Pope in 2014.

Since Forrest appointed himself the 21st century’s William Wilberforce, the number of people in slavery has not fallen, but risen (to more than 40 million, according to research commissioned by his foundation). Still, he has helped increase awareness of the extent of the tragedy, and in this country successfully lobbied for passage through federal parliament in 2018 of the Modern Slavery Act, which requires large companies to report on the risks of slavery in their supply chains.

The Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston revealed last year that Forrest had broken his own rules: solar panels at Fortescue’s green-energy plant in the Pilbara were manufactured by a Chinese company with established links to forced labour by Uighurs. Embarrassing? You might think so, but Forrest doesn’t really do embarrassment. What he does do, disconcertingly, is refer to himself in third person. “If it can happen to Forrest, an anti-slavery campaigner, it can happen to everyone,” he says of the solar-panels snafu. “This is how alert we all must be.”

At Fortescue Future Industries’ Perth head office, I half-expect to find hundreds of people on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Word is that the strain of trying to realise Forrest’s green-hydrogen dream has taken a toll on workers. “Ridiculous expectations. Massively long hours,” one former staffer has told me. But the boss’s arrival is greeted with bright smiles all round.

“They feel intense pressure, and they’re loving it,” Forrest says. He encourages employees to think of themselves as members of “the Fortescue family”. Ex-staffers I interview say he has a cult leader’s ability to inspire devotion: even those who fly the coop tend to remain in his thrall. “Andrew is very charismatic. I love the guy,” says a former FFI executive, who explains that Fortescue’s corporate values are spelled out in a booklet issued to each employee. “It’s basically like a Fortescue bible,” he says, adding that some colleagues carried the booklet in their pockets. “They told me they read it on the bus and over the weekend.” He pauses. “Wow, that’s messed up.”

“Do I try to live a good life? Do I try to do my best for humanity? Yeah, I do those things. But I fail all the time. I’m the most imperfect person I know.”

A woman who worked for the Minderoo Foundation remembers basking in Forrest’s approval: “He’s such a warm character that when you’re in his good books, it’s awesome.” No one wants to be in his bad books. “If you mucked up, he could be pretty harsh,” says geologist David Mendelawitz, who joined Fortescue before workable ore deposits were discovered. Mendelawitz thrived at the young company but knew others were intimidated by Forrest: “He put the fear of god into people.”

From what Nichola Garvey saw, even the staffers closest to him were kept on edge: “He had an ability to make people feel like they were his best mate, that they were part of the inner circle, but every now and again he would take a 180-degree turn and cut you down.”

Several ex-employees say Forrest approaches business – especially the green-energy business – as if he’s on a holy mission. “Messiah complex,” they murmur. Forrest is a committed Christian, though he makes clear to me that he doesn’t pretend to be a model of rectitude. “Do I try to live a good life? Do I try to do my best for humanity? Yeah, I do those things,” he says. “But I fail all the time. I’m the most imperfect person I know.”

He says, too, that he thinks of his business as belonging to his workers as much as to him. “It doesn’t matter that I might hold the shares in it,” he says he tells them. “You’ve got to treat this company like it’s yours.” Mendelawitz, now chief executive of minerals processing company Elmore, takes the we’re-all-in-this-together stuff with a grain of salt. Even in the early years, he says, “Andrew elevated himself way above everybody. He was never down there in the trenches like he would make you believe.”

Forrest’s old business partner, Warwick Grigor, who like Mendelawitz sees much to admire in the Fortescue founder, says, “He does like people to know that at the end of the day, he’s got the whip hand.”

Forrest’s employees are sometimes asked to put the Fortescue family before their actual families. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Forrest led a 40-person team that scoured the world for renewable-energy-generation sites, visiting 47 countries in five months. “Those people have kids, they have lives,” says an ex-staffer. “But that is the deal. You are just expected to drop everything.”

Forrest might argue that it works both ways. In 2011, a Fortescue employee was attacked and killed by a French backpacker in Broome. Forrest had befriended the employee, an Indigenous man who had turned his life around after spending most of his 20s in jail. What’s more, Forrest had agreed he would take care of his three kids if anything ever happened to him. Forrest tells me the children and their mother are considered part of the Forrest family. The youngest one still lives with him and Nicola.

Members of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation celebrate their legal victory over Fortescue in 2020.Credit:

Not long ago, Fortescue lost a marathon legal battle against the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, representing traditional owners of a parcel of land in the Pilbara that includes the site of the company’s multi-billion-dollar Solomon mine hub. Fortescue had been willing to pay for permission to mine the land but the Yindjibarndi people rejected the company’s offer as too low.

Rather than continue negotiating, Fortescue proceeded to mine without their agreement. The Solomon hub started operating in 2013. The traditional owners went to the Federal Court, which ruled they had exclusive native title – the equivalent of freehold title – over the land. Fortescue’s final appeal against the judgment was thrown out by the High Court in 2020. The Yindjibarndi have since filed a compensation claim.

Forrest is indignant. “I’m not going to hand over big cheques just because someone thinks they can demand it,” he tells me. He argues that he has the Yindjibarndi’s interests at heart, and that handouts of any kind, whether mining royalties or welfare cheques, weaken Indigenous communities. “Patronising,” says Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation chief executive Michael Woodley, who sums up Forrest’s position this way:  “‘The best thing for Aboriginal people is what I think it is.’ ”

Forrest does regard himself as something of an authority on Indigenous matters. “I grew up with Aboriginal people,” he says. As a child at Minderoo Station, he idolised the head stockman, Scotty Black. “He taught me corroboree – how to dance, paint myself – and how to track, how to hunt without a gun. We were very close.” Forrest even has an Indigenous name, Nyidinghu, which people in the Pilbara shorten to Nyidie. “They all know that Nyidie is fair,” he says. “Nyidie has said since he was little, ‘The more you know Aboriginal people, the more you love them.’ ”

A young Andrew with Minderoo Station head stockman Scotty Black.Credit: Courtesy of Andrew Forrest

In 2008, Forrest was the instigator of a government-backed program he said would place 50,000 Aboriginal people in employment within two years. The target was nowhere near met, but he remains convinced that jobs are the key to ending Indigenous disadvantage. About 10 per cent of Fortescue’s workforce is Indigenous, and the company says it has awarded contracts worth more than $3 billion to Aboriginal businesses and joint ventures.

When in 2013, the then federal Coalition government invited Forrest to review its Indigenous training and employment programs, he recommended that the government test the use of a welfare card that restricted spending on alcohol and gambling. The cashless debit card, as it became known, was introduced at trial sites across the country.

The federal Labor Albanese government announced last month that it would scrap the program, which the Australian National Audit Office found had failed to prove useful. Critics say it was demeaning – an echo of the era when pastoralists like Forrest’s forebears paid Aboriginal stockmen in flour, tea and sugar. “I’ve heard people say often: ‘We’re back to the ration days,’ ” says Michele Madigan, a member of the Josephite religious order who has spent almost 40 years working in Aboriginal communities in remote areas of South Australia. “It was 100 per cent paternalism.”

The day of the Liddell power station visit, Forrest meets Queensland National Party senator Matt Canavan and two other men in the nearby town of Singleton. His aim is to sell the pro-coal Canavan on green hydrogen but the discussion turns to Indigenous Australians, and what Forrest sees as the harmful tendency of the general community to be too indulgent towards them. “It’s like spoiling a child,” he says. No one speaks for a moment, then the conversation moves on.

Seven years ago, Forrest was hiking in the Kimberley when a ridge gave way and he fell into a large pool. One of his legs shattered from the kneecap down as it wedged in a loop of submerged tree root, trapping him underwater. The pain was excruciating and in wrenching himself free, he mangled the leg further: by the time he struggled to the surface, his foot was facing the wrong way. The accident may not have killed him, as for a few heart-thumping seconds he thought it would, but it changed him.

During his convalescence, as he moved from a wheelchair to crutches and finally back onto his feet, he had time for reflection. He decided to embark on a PhD in marine science, a field that had always fascinated him. For four years, he immersed himself in the study of pelagic ecology and, more broadly, the state of the world’s oceans. “It was there that I really came across the reality of global warming,” he says. By 2019, he was Dr Forrest, eco-warrior.

As he tells it, misfortune was also the indirect cause of an earlier transformative experience: becoming a billionaire. When Anaconda Nickel got into trouble all those years ago, the size of his shareholding was too small to stop other investors taking control of the company and turfing him out, he says. He resolved that he wouldn’t let it happen again. “That’s the inadvertent reason I became very wealthy. Fortescue became immensely successful, and I’d always kept a big enough stake to defend it.”

“Everything is about Andrew Forrest. His image. His brand. It’s because of the wealth that he has generated from our country. That’s what money does, right? It turns you into a superstar.”

Mounting debts had forced Forrest’s father, Don, to sell Minderoo Station in 1998. When the property came back onto the market 11 years later, Forrest sent two bidders to the auction – “just in case one had to go to the toilet or had a heart attack”. He bought it for $12 million and has spent millions more turning the station into a showpiece. He says he does his best thinking there. The place is full of memories, not all of them good.

When Forrest was a boy, just eight years old, he noticed smoke on a distant part of the property. Lighting a fire was the accepted method of sending a distress signal, so he and Don went to investigate. A man had been working on the engine of a bulldozer when it jumped forward and pinned him against a gum tree. He had managed to light a fire but it burned back towards the tree and engulfed him.

“When we got there, we found this charred but breathing body,” says Forrest, who travelled with the man in the back of the Land Rover on the long drive to hospital. “He could just speak and he said, ‘Sing me some nursery rhymes.’ ” Forrest held the man’s hand and sang to him until he died. He tells me during our lunch at Cottesloe that it was this experience, more than any other, that shaped him. From then on, he understood at a visceral level that life was short and not a day should be wasted: “I do tend to treat time as being incredibly precious.”

Time is valuable to Yindjibarndi leader Michael Woodley, too, and he has spent a lot of it slogging his way towards legal recognition of his people’s ownership of land on which Fortescue mines. “Everything is about Andrew Forrest. His image. His brand,” says Woodley, who contends that if Forrest has been able to live a large life, “it’s because of the wealth that he has generated from our country. That’s what money does, right? It turns you into a superstar.”

As I sit with Forrest at the long table, I am thinking about something his old business partner Warwick Grigor said: “We should be encouraging Andrew, not trying to drag him down.” I am thinking about Woodley, too, and the burnt man, and the boy singing nursery rhymes. Biscotti crumbs are on the plates in front of us. Forrest glances at my cup. “Is your coffee hot, darl?” he asks.

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