Step inside Rose Porteous’ new quiet, contented life at the former site of Prix d'Amour
Rose Porteous dominated headlines for decades after her marriage to Pilbara pioneer Lang Hancock. Those turbulent years are behind her now – and a remarkable family reconciliation has brought her peace and contentment.
Here she is, surrounded once more by the works of art, Louis XV furniture, bespoke Waterford crystal chandelier and even the fireplace from the Prix d’Amour mansion she once shared with her late husband, legendary iron ore pioneer Lang Hancock. Around Rose Porteous, there is an air of contentment. At her feet, her beloved poodles Lulette and Lullie.
Porteous is back on the very site of Prix d’Amour in Perth’s blue-ribbon Mosman Park. The 17-bedroom mansion was demolished in 2006 and the sprawling 8,200sqm parcel of land subdivided into 10 titles. Here, in a modern three-level house with a glass lift running from the six-car basement, Porteous is conducting her first interview for almost a decade. We’re sitting where the Prix d’Amour rose garden once was. “For me, this [site] is special because of the rose garden,” she says. “I’m back at the spot all my poodles loved. Dennis, Linus, Snoopy, and Lulu – all four poodles [from the Prix d’Amour days] would come and sniff the rose garden, because I had about 200 roses here.
“They were more disciplined than these two,” she says, gesturing towards the new-generation Lulette and Lullie. “These two, they fight.”
The 76-year-old, a household name from the time she married Hancock, spent 11 years after the iron ore magnate’s death consumed by an epic, at times incendiary and very public legal feud with his daughter, Gina Rinehart – now Australia’s richest woman. But she seems to have come up roses. She’s wearing a new D Flawless 7-carat diamond ring – a 33rd wedding anniversary gift from her fourth husband, the prominent developer and real estate agent William Porteous, whom she married three months after Hancock died at the Prix d’Amour guesthouse.
“I can’t afford a divorce!” her husband quips.
She responds: “That’s what he always says. ‘I can’t even afford a bus fare to the airport to get away!’”
She’s content for other reasons, too. After a turbulent and deeply painful falling out, she has reconciled with her former wild-child daughter, Johanna Lacson. For years, the pair exchanged poisoned barbs through the media, but that’s all water under the bridge. Lacson, a nurse, lives nearby with her two teenagers, including a 14-year-old daughter who is her grandmother’s mirror image at the same age.
“I am content with what I have, I am happy with the way I live my life,” says Porteous. “I have a wonderful husband, a beautiful daughter, two grandchildren, two poodles, and a family I can go back to in the Philippines, called my brother [businessman Sal Lacson].
“I’ve been there, done it all. I could not want for more. What more could you want in life?”
If you haven’t heard the name Rose Porteous for a while, it’s probably because she has spent the best part of the past two decades doing what would have been unfathomable during the 20-odd years before that. That is, living a quiet, private life, well away from the media glare.
Back in September 2003, Porteous and Rinehart finally called a truce to their marathon legal feud, which had pitted them in a battle for the iron ore riches of the man nicknamed the “Rogue Bull”. Since then, Porteous has lived quietly in some of Australia’s wealthiest postcodes including Melbourne’s Toorak, and Claremont and Nedlands in Perth, before returning full circle to Mosman Park.
In a rare interview granted to The Australian Weekend Magazine at her new home, the former socialite – once known Australia-wide simply by her first name – says she has finally found her equilibrium.
“You ask me, do I want to socialise? Do I want to be with people?” she asks. “No, I’d rather be with my poodles. And I think every pet owner would relate to that. With entertaining, I do intimate special dinners for friends I trust. Or big ones usually for William’s birthdays.
“In Claremont [shopping and café strip], they say, ‘Rose, why aren’t you on TV? It’s so boring!’ I say, ‘I’m not your clown’. Enough is enough.”
It’s all very different from Perth’s free-wheeling 1980s when a 32-year-old Rose Lacson arrived in town. Perth had colourful, big-spending entrepreneurs like the late Alan Bond and Laurie Connell livening things up. But the cyclonic force of nature, which had found landfall in the West from the Philippines, was something else altogether.
She was born Rosemarie Magdalena Teresita Lacson in the city of Bacolod, on the sugar-belt island of Negros Occidental in the western Philippines. Her paternal grandfather, General Aniceto Lacson, was the first President of Negros. The main street of Bacolod is named General Aniceto Lacson Street. “He wanted to secede from the rest of the Philippines due to the wealth of the volcanic soil, but the Americans came in 1898,” Porteous says. “Under the Treaty of Paris the Philippines was given to the USA by Spain. We were under Spain for 350 years.
“My grandfather led the Negros revolution against Spain, which is a public holiday in Negros known as Cinco de Noviembre.”
She arrived in Perth in 1983, on a stopover on a family business trip to New Zealand. It was during this time that Gina Rinehart made a decision she would live to regret: she hired the young Filipino as her father’s housekeeper at his home beside the Swan River in Dalkeith (even though she didn’t have a working visa).
Just two years later, Rose Lacson became Mrs Rose Hancock after marrying an iron ore mogul nearly 40 years her senior.
Then came Prix d’Amour.
Built by the couple on a prime 16-block site in Mosman Park, with breathtaking views across the Swan River to the city, Prix d’Amour would become one of Australia’s most recognised – and photographed – mansions. Its legend was such that it was featured on advertising screens at Perth Airport, where fresh arrivals could also book a seat on a tour bus, drive to the sprawling mansion, and take pictures through the iron gates on Wellington Street.
For some, the landmark property was symbolic of the riches generated by Western Australia’s booming iron ore industry and a testimony to the visionary who’d helped to pioneer it. Others viewed it as an ostentatious, over-the-top show of wealth.
According to Porteous, Prix d’Amour was, much like her, the subject of much myth.
The property drew many comparisons with the Tara plantation mansion in the 1939 film Gone With The Wind. That fictional home, whose fate is tied to the fortunes of the protagonist Scarlett O’Hara, was said to have captured Porteous’s imagination. She reveals for the first time that that was never the case.
“No, they always say Gone With The Wind – I’ve never even seen that house,” she says.
Rather, Prix d’Amour’s true architectural origins, she reveals, were inspired by the designs of a controversial German architect.
“I’ll be very honest with you, OK, and people will misunderstand this,” she says. “I love the work of Albert Speer. He was the architect of Hitler. I do not like anything that is synonymous with it [Nazism] – the only thing that interests me was his architecture. I have his book, and I saw the footlights that he did, and that was where my inspiration for Prix d’Amour was from. The footlights, the columns … not Gone With the Wind.”
Speer’s “footlights” were famously put to use at Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg during the 1930s when he turned anti-aircraft searchlights upwards to give the aesthetic illusion of large columns flanking the audience. The effect, known as “The Cathedral of Light”, lent a sense of grandeur to the occasions.
“Often when I travel, I go to all the war memorials. I go to the cemeteries to look at the history of all the people there, and I have been to the cemetery [in Heidelberg, Germany] of Albert Speer.”
With a ballroom accommodating 400 guests, Prix d’Amour became the scene for some of Perth’s most lavish parties, and quickly earned Lang Hancock’s young bride a reputation as the city’s most flamboyant socialite. It was a whirlwind era in which she now concedes she was immature and suffering from culture shock. She denies, however, that her lavish persona was contrived in any way.
“I couldn’t say I wasn’t myself before; at that time I needed to grow up some more, I needed to mature,” she says. “So, I was probably a bit of the immature Rose at that time. Every time I got interviewed, I would set myself up.
“When I first came to Australia, I did suffer culture shock because I was different. Here I am an Asian, and in Asia I’m not really considered an Asian – back home I’m not considered a full Filippino, they called me a ‘mestizo’ because of the Spanish influence [from my father’s side], you know, because … I don’t look like a Filipino.
“So when I came here, I was young, I was myself – maybe flamboyant to the Australian public – but back home I was like that, that is why I was probably called a socialite back home. Not in a sense of being a girl socialite appearing in newspapers, but I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. I was everywhere.
“You know, you can bring the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. I was just the way my parents would have asked me to be. Entertaining – I would put out the best, because that’s what you were brought up for.
“And I probably shocked the whole of Australia, but who cares? I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t care. If my breeding was misunderstood as flamboyance or being too excessive, sorry, that’s the way I was brought up. Take it or leave it, you know. And it’s still my philosophy nowadays: you take me, or leave me.”
Looking back, she says she can see that “the past is indeed a prologue for the future”.
“All that I have gone through sums up my deeper perspective of living a meaningful life: respect, dignity, empathy, genuine friendships, reaching out to those in need. Most importantly, quality time with my husband, my family and loved ones.”
Her high-profile marriage to Hancock lasted seven years before the 82-year-old died in the guesthouse at Prix d’Amour in 1992. And that’s when the next very public chapter of her life began.
No sooner had Hancock been buried than the scuffle over his fortune began. Rinehart fired the first salvo, launching Supreme Court proceedings to claw back from her father’s widow the assets she’d been gifted during their marriage. Those assets included Prix d’Amour, as well as buildings in Perth and Sydney’s Double Bay, a mansion in Florida and expensive jewellery, collectively estimated to be worth about $30 million at the time. The socialite countered with her own legal claims against Rinehart, angling for a cut of the iron ore riches from her late husband’s private flagship Hancock Prospecting.
The two women duelled ferociously, and very publicly, in the courts for more than a decade. By 2003, the court judgments had swung in favour of Hancock’s widow and she had also been cleared of any wrongdoing in his death after a long-running coronial inquest, which Rinehart had lobbied for. In September that year, what was reported as “Australia’s most bitter, expensive and bizarre legal feud” ended when the pair signed a confidential settlement in which they both effectively kept what they had, minus the tens of millions of dollars spent in legal fees. (However, it wouldn’t be the end of Rinehart’s legal battles over the private iron ore fortune built on her father’s inheritance, with multiple claims involving two of her children, Bianca and John, the descendants of her father’s late business partner Peter Wright, and the family of the late prospector Don Rhodes still before the courts).
Within two years of the settlement with her father’s widow, Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting signed a landmark joint venture agreement with Rio Tinto to develop the Hope Downs iron ore mine, profits from which have helped her become Australia’s richest woman with an estimated personal wealth of $40 billion.
Porteous makes it clear in our interview that the 2003 legal settlement – the contents of which remain confidential to this day – is a strictly taboo subject for her to discuss.
Her daughter, Johanna Lacson, says one major positive that came from the 11-year legal battle was that it showcased publicly a side of her mother that few people had previously seen or appreciated. Even under intense cross-examination, her intellect and sharp wit was on display as she demonstrated she could go toe-to-toe with high-profile silks acting for Rinehart, including the late Tom Hughes QC.
Indeed, in one Supreme Court session I witnessed in 1999, Judge Robert Anderson had to call for order from the packed public gallery after Porteous had observers in fits of laughter. Asked by Hughes if she still wasn’t getting along with Rinehart, she retorted: “Obviously, or else you wouldn’t be here earning so much.”
“Now, after all the court cases, I’m so glad that in the Supreme Court my mother got her dignity as the real Rose – not the flamboyant socialite, but the intelligent Rose who could serve it back up to the best QC from Sydney,” Lacson says. “Willie [Porteous] was there; he was so proud of her.
“They called her a socialite holding lavish parties. But there’s so much more depth to her – she’s not just a socialite, she does a lot of charity work, and she’s very intelligent. People don’t see that about her.”
The legal settlement finally freed up Rose Porteous to cash in her assets for the first time. With her accrued lawyers’ fees from the 11-year legal fight mounting, she moved quickly to sell Prix d’Amour. When the record $30 million price tag failed to attract a buyer, she and her husband opted to demolish the sprawling mansion and subdivide the block.
Porteous admits to having mixed emotions when, in front of a crowd of onlookers, the wrecking ball swung through Prix d’Amour in March 2006. “I had to go to Melbourne, I couldn’t watch it,” she says. “I felt sad – but at the same time, I’d lost my privacy there. All the tour buses … and somebody shot a bullet through the window. The police came and said it wasn’t a bullet, but we found shrapnel.”
She and her husband kept three of the 10 blocks; two covered the old guesthouse at Prix d’Amour, the other the old rose garden. After first hiring Melbourne architect Nicholas Day to draw up plans for a mansion on the guesthouse site, they opted instead to build a smaller house on the rose garden site. (Property rich-lister Tony Lennon now lives in the mansion he built on the old guesthouse site.) While her real estate husband has fielded a $20 million offer for it since moving in, Rose Porteous’s new home on Saunders Street is, unlike Prix d’Amour, far from a tourist drawcard on Perth’s millionaires’ row. Indeed, it’s nowhere near the size and grandeur of some of her neighbours’ properties, like the sprawling cliffside estate that embattled mining mogul Chris Ellison bought in 2009 from Angela Bennett, the daughter of Lang Hancock’s late partner Peter Wright, in what was a then-record $57.5 million deal (handled by William Porteous).
Last year, former Reserve Bank of Australia board member Mark Barnaba hosted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at his Saunders Street mansion, while mining mogul Tim Goyder also calls the street home.
The Porteouses’ new house took the best part of three years to build, but it took little time to furnish when they moved into it in 2023. She had stored all the furniture from Prix d’Amour, including the Waterford crystal chandelier which hung above the solid French rosewood dining table (and which took several days to dismantle), and even the decorative Egyptian Sphinx statues standing guard at the front door.
“Even the fireplaces are from Prix d’Amour,” Porteous says. “William spent a fortune storing it all – and there’s still some more in storage because I brought all the furniture from Melbourne [where she lived for several years] as well. And we’re not talking IKEA or Target, you know.
“In fact, the only furniture we bought was the outdoor furniture.”
While her new house on the old rose garden site is not designed to look anything like Prix d’Amour, Porteous points out that it shares one thing in common: “I just love a house that seemingly floats on a sea of lights. That is the only similar thing.”
For Porteous, reconnecting with a daughter who in a paidtelevision interview in 1992 said her mother deserved to be called a gold digger has been a significant turning point in her life. The pair are closer than ever, and regularly travel together to France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe.
“I was very vindictive, I said a lot of things which I obviously regret now,” Lacson tells me. “Daughters and sons have fights with their parents – the difference was I had people who actually broadcasted it [in the media].
“After all the decades of travelling, partying … when I came back here, it’s always my Mum that picks me up. Whatever craziness I’ve got myself into in the past, she’s always there to pick me up. At the end of the day, my Mum has moved forward from everything, and she’s keeping a dignified silence. She’s the most important thing in my life.”
Porteous says she has also rekindled old friendships from her school days in the Philippines with “aunties” who have become her travelling companions. She is revisiting her childhood passions for poetry and the Spanish language “because it’s got a lot of proverbs, a lot of very wise proverbs, that cannot be translated into English. I grew up with the Spanish language – I can speak, read and write in Spanish, and I do translations in Spanish”.
“I love my mental attitude now and my emotional stability,” she adds. “I love the fact that I can still memorise poetry that I did when I was seven years old. I have a photographic memory.
“I love Tennyson, I love Wordsworth, I love Shakespeare. I taught Shakespeare for three years in Kuala Lumpur. It’s a very hard subject to teach because people get bored. You have to liven it up, you know.”
She says she has an affection for the Enlightenment-era English poet Alexander Pope, and “the classics”.
“I ask people, ‘What’s the first epic in English literature?’ And nobody can say. You know what it was? Beowulf. And it’s written in old English script. You can hardly understand it. I had to write a thesis on that. And thank God I took up English literature, because English literature covers history and everything, it’s so well-rounded.
“Mentally, I’m OK. Body? I don’t know. I live day to day. I see all my friends dying. And it’s very sad. I’m not scared to die, I’m not scared at all. You know, to be honest with you, if I conk off tonight in my sleep, I can honestly say, ‘My God, Rose, you have really lived a full life. You’ve done everything your way’.”
Lacson describes her mother as a contronym. “There are some words in the English language that have two meanings, but they’re opposite meanings. And she’s like that. She is a contronym. There’s not many words like that, and I’m sure there’s not many people like that.”
It’s an ironic reference because as Porteous points out, the French word Prix is also a contronym. Which means Prix d’Amour translates as the prize of love. Or, the price of love. Take your pick.
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