It is easy in this business to get one’s head turned. The exciting drilling result, over-egged by a well-paid public relations person on the other end of the telephone line, and the reporter can easily get just a little carried away and go along with the hype.
Of course, in today’s bull market, rock chip sampling or radiometric anomalies are enough to energise both PR flack and any reporter who has not been through all this before.
And the investor. The United States markets down 200-plus points on Tuesday, regaining all the ground the next night. And now that’s three huge falls in one month. Well, if the market goes down - and stays down - then there are going to be many, many glum faces among those who bought some of these exciting rock chip and radiometric anomaly stories.
So let’s throw a bucket of cold water over the reader’s head in the form of a wistful look back 16 years. In the process of a long overdue clean-up in the attic, some yellowing newspaper clippings were unearthed.
“Junior miner Austmin Gold NL has announced what it describes as extremely encouraging platinum and palladium intersections at its Weld Range project in Western Australia,” an impressionable reporter (me!) told his readers.
Austmin also had chromite targets, but managing director Guido Staltari did caution it was early days.
As indeed it was. Austmin was taken over by Burmine, which was eventually absorbed by Sons of Gwalia. No PGM mine or exciting story after all.
Wayne McCrae was in the news. His Diversified Mineral Resources was awarded 200 square kilometres south of CRA’s Century prospect. McCrae said of his new asset that it was a prime base metals prospecting region.
“You couldn’t get more prime,” he added.
DMR subsequently disappeared into Hargraves Resources, which itself was swallowed by what is now DRDGold.
Merlin Mining NL decided to tap shareholders to raise money to revive its chromite project in the Philippines. Merlin has since had seven name changes, the most recent to Monitor Energy which is searching for uranium in Kyrgyzstan.
Hopes were high on the African front. Golden Shamrock Mines was about to buy a treatment plant in Ghana, Takoradi Gold NL was about start drilling in that same country. There was great excitement about having projects on Ghana’s rich gold belt. Pioneer Resources NL had rutile plans in Sierra Leone, Auridiam Consolidated its big diamond play in Zimbabwe while Australian Overseas Mining was prospecting in Swaziland.
There were, of course, the inevitable casualties of 1991. Coopers Resources NL, Great Fingall Mining Co NL and Phoenix Oil & Gas NL, all members of one interlinked group, were suspended by the ASX. These companies had all once belonged to Joseph Gutnick and were sold to a group of Melbourne investors.
All were subsequently delisted.
As had AUR NL which operated the Mt Martin mine near Kalgoorlie; the company had struggled at a time when gold prices had fallen, but its fate was sealed by association with the New Zealand property group Chase Corp which had been hit by the stricken property market.
At the time, growing stockpiles and the restrained global economic situation meant there was no bright outlook for recoveries in the prices of metals, particularly copper, nickel and aluminium - the latter at its lowest value since 1987. Analysts took the view that nickel was doing well to hold at $US8800 per tonne.
Pasminco forecast a loss for the year unless world zinc and lead prices rose substantially. Great Northern Mining Corp NL (now King Island Scheelite) had placed its tin operation in Queensland on care and maintenance with the metal fetching about $US6200/t. The company said it would need to be above $US10,000/t to justify reopening the mine.
North Broken Hill-Peko paid $125 million to Pancontinental Mining for the Jabiluka uranium deposit, an investment still to pay off.
But of course, this time it’s different.
