Poseidon NL created one of the biggest mining booms ever witnessed by the Australian Stock Exchange. It all started in Adelaide in September 1969, and it's somehow typically Australian that Poseidon takes its name from a racehorse that won the Melbourne Cup.
Occurring at a time when nickel was in short supply, the discovery triggered a rush for shares in Poseidon that reverberated through the stock market of the world. Fortunes were made and lost in all parts of the globe as the shares went from $0.80 to $280.00 in five months and then down to $39.00 ten months later and, by 1976, to $0.38.
You can read up about the Poseidon Boom in this book which sells on ebay for $45 (plus postage). If you want a less historically accurate description, watch "Nickel Queen", a 1971 Australian comedy film loosely based on the Poseidon bubble which tells of an outback pub owner who stakes a claim and finds herself an overnight millionaire.
The film, shot in Perth and in the ghost town of Broad Arrow, is full of plugs for companies that helped finance it. Highly popular in parochial Perth, running for six months, it was less so in the eastern states.
The real star of the movie is John Laws as the Manson-esque hippie cult-leader, Claude. As Lawsy famously said then, "Hey, we don't recognise the insatiable need of most men to work." Those of us who at the time worked on the Bougainville Copper Project did, especially after we had, as Johnny-come-latelies, poured our money into other nickel shares such as Kambalda, Compass Western Minerals, Lamadec Exploration, VAM - remember them, Des? - and saw them finish up as toilet paper.
Comment from Ian Paterson: "Tasmanex NL was another penny dreadful. One investor even bought one share in Poseidon as a wedding gift!!!"
