The modern industry begins at Kambalda, south of Kalgoorlie, where Western Mining Corporation found nickel sulphide in 1966 and began production in 1968. The timing was extraordinary. The Vietnam War had driven nickel demand to record highs, and a long strike against the dominant Canadian producer, Inco, had choked global supply. Prices spiked. Suddenly the unglamorous Goldfields, long synonymous with gold, were sitting on a metal the world urgently wanted. The ore here is mostly the komatiite-hosted sulphide type, formed 2,700 million years ago from volcanic flows so hot they have no modern equivalent. It made Western Australia one of the planet's premier nickel provinces almost overnight.

Into that fevered market stepped Poseidon NL, which in September 1969 reported promising nickel results at Mount Windarra, 22 kilometres northwest of Laverton. Word leaked, insiders bought, and the share price detonated. Investors who had never seen a drill core poured savings into anything with the word 'nickel' attached. The peak came in February 1970; the crash followed almost immediately. When Poseidon finally produced nickel, the price had fallen, the ore proved lower-grade and costlier than hoped, and the company slid into receivership by 1974. The Poseidon bubble entered the history books as a cautionary tale - and a permanent reminder that the metal giveth and taketh away.

Behind the share charts were people who did dangerous work in difficult places, and some did not come home. During the development of the Leinster mine in April 1977, five workers fell 35 metres in an ore bucket at the Perseverance shaft and died. A cave-in killed a man in 1981; in December 1985, two more died of asphyxiation underground, the second while trying to rescue the first. At the Kwinana refinery in June 1978, J. W. Bell collapsed in a converter vessel - a faulty seal on his mask is presumed the cause - and his colleague S. J. Haywood died trying to save him, both overcome by nitrogen gas. The list is short on names and long on the same quiet tragedy: someone who turned back to help.

Nickel leaves a long environmental tail. The Bulong mine near Kalgoorlie operated for just five years, from 1998 to 2003, yet by 2016 its cleanup was projected to cost as much as $6.8 million - against a rehabilitation bond of only $1.1 million from its former owners. Abandoned tailings dams and evaporation ponds threatened nearby Lake Yindarlgooda, and a state investigation eventually ran to 900 pages. A rehabilitation fund introduced in 2013 was, by one estimate, two decades away from holding enough to matter. The lesson of Bulong is that a mine can be gone in five years and leave a mess that outlasts the company that made it.

For a few years it looked different. Nickel is essential to the lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles, and a green-energy boom promised the Goldfields a clean second act. Then Indonesia flooded the market with vast quantities of cheaper nickel, and prices collapsed in 2024. One operation after another fell. Andrew Forrest's Wyloo moved to shutter the historic Kambalda mines; Panoramic's Savannah workers were made redundant; and on 11 July 2024, BHP suspended its entire Nickel West division, citing global oversupply. The cycle that began with a Vietnam-era spike and a stock-market mania had turned once more. The metal is still in the ground, exactly where the volcanoes left it. It always is. The only question that ever changes is the price.