Description
Australia’s Nickel Adventure is hot off the press and back from the printers. At 188 pages, including over 170 photos and maps, Australia’s Nickel Adventure covers the history of nickel exploration and mining over the past 50 years.
Many who were born in the previous century will remember the frenetic Poseidon nickel boom when junior stock prices would soar on a questionable rumour or on the basis a company had pegged ground near a discovery.
Australia’s nickel story actually began more than a decade before that crazy stock market phase and that is one of the starting points in “Australia’s Nickel Adventure” produced by Silver Budgie Pty Ltd to mark the story of Australia’s ongoing role as a great global nickel producers.
It was a story that really went public at the end of the 1960s when Western Mining Corporation (later WMC Resources) discovered sulphide nickel at Kambalda.
The fortunes of Australia’s performance as a producer of both sulphide and lateritic nickel has waxed and waned with the nickel markets but its role in the Australian economy has often been under-stated.
A lot of remarkable people and innovative companies have worked in this sector and this is recorded in this book.
It is a history worth recording with all its excitement and disappointment, colourful stories, and engineering and technological advancements.
A phenomenal metal’s erratic life
The nickel industry in Australia has been a modern mining phenomenon that is now a few years beyond its 50th birthday.
Perhaps no other metal in Australia’s mining history has had a more erratic health graph, at times in seventh heaven and others like it has been in cardiac arrest.
There was a frenetic nickel boom that ended as a big bust in the early 1970s and nickel was again on the commodity price surfboard as part of the commodities boom of the early 2010s.
The sulphide nickel discoveries at Kambalda and the bonanza grade deposits at Cosmos and Silver Swan put exploration and the share market into over-drive, while the lateritic nickel push that saw Murrin Murrin and Cawse evolve provided a mixture of success and anxiety, with the latter coming from the big learning arc with processing technologies.
But these are just some of the stories covered in this book that has taken Ross Louthean and Carl Knox-Robinson nearly three years to produce.
Over the decades companies were made on nickel discoveries and production but many who did not make the grade either converted to new roles or went to the corporate graveyard.
In 2016 the nickel mining sector was again in the trough, with Australia seen as being overshadowed by pig nickel from laterite mines in Indonesia and the Philippines.
However, the future for both sulphide and lateritic nickel has elevated dramatically since, largely through nickel sulphate being in the mix with lithium, cobalt and graphite in the rapidly growing electric vehicles market and for high quality batteries.
This will be a major growth market and exactly where nickel will sit does not have an immediate answer but the role should be somewhere between strong and spectacular.
Vince Corkery, miner, boring the face of Ken 6L North Drive, Kambalda, May 1976. Photo by Jim Reeve.
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