The nickel here was found in 1971 by Western Selcast, and developing such a deposit in country this remote demanded everything be built from scratch. The Agnew Mining Company was formed in 1974, underground work began mid-decade, and a town rose alongside the mine to house the people who would run it. Leinster is a purpose-built company town, and an unexpectedly generous one: out in the spinifex it offers an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an eighteen-hole golf course and a full school, comforts almost surreal for a settlement this isolated. Premier Charles Court officially opened the mine on 5 November 1978. Ore concentrate left by road for Leonora, then by rail to the smelter at Kalgoorlie, beginning a supply chain that still threads across the state today.

Nickel is a commodity of violent extremes, and Leinster has been whipsawed by every swing. The price tells the story better than any narrative. When the mine was shut in the mid-1980s, nickel had collapsed to about US$1.70 a pound; by the time it reopened in 1989, the price had surged to US$8.30. Ownership changed hands with the cycles. BP gained control of part of the operation in 1985, then sold out in 1988, the same year MIM Holdings sold its share for A$120 million. WMC Resources reopened the mine in 1989 and ran it for years, until WMC itself was swallowed by mining giant BHP in 2005. By then Leinster employed more than eleven hundred people and anchored BHP's Nickel West division, briefly the largest nickel producer in the state.

The 1977 tragedy was not the only one. In 1981 a man was killed in an underground cave-in. On 11 December 1985, two miners died of asphyxiation below ground, the second while trying to rescue the first, a detail that says everything about the bonds formed in such work. In April 2010 another miner fell to his death in the underground operation. These were not statistics but men with families, doing dangerous work far from home so that metal could reach the surface. The 1977 disaster carried legal weight as well: four mine personnel, including the registered manager and the master shaft-sinker, faced manslaughter charges in the Kalgoorlie Supreme Court over the deaths. The mine's history of production cannot honestly be told without the history of those who did not come home.

At full tilt, Leinster fed an industrial chain stretching the width of Western Australia. Nickel sulphide ore came from open pits and deep underground; concentrate was dried and railed to the Kalgoorlie smelter, then on to the Kwinana refinery, where it was finished into nickel metal of 99.8 percent purity and shipped out through Fremantle. The metal ended up in stainless steel and, increasingly, in the batteries powering the electric-vehicle revolution. Yet that very revolution helped undo the mine. A global glut of cheaper nickel, much of it from Indonesia, crushed prices, and in July 2024 BHP announced it would suspend all of Nickel West, including Leinster, placing the operations into care and maintenance from October. The decision affected around 1,600 workers, with a review not due until 2027. After nearly fifty years, the desert town built around the mine fell quiet, waiting to see whether the nickel price would ever call it back to life.