Alan Bond: From the highest highs to the lowest lows

It broke the longest winning streak in sporting history and anointed the English-born Bond as the personification of Australia's underdog spirit and optimism at a time when the country's successes on the global were few and far between.

It opened doors for Bond and also acted as a harbinger of the 1980s boom years to come.

"If I could achieve the win of the America's Cup, was there anything I couldn't do?" was how he described his mood of the time in a later interview.  

Bond's eternal optimism, and cheap debt from Australia's freshly de-regulated banking system, funded an acquisition spree that has become corporate folklore.

"They were all knocking on the door and walking in the front door," he told Andrew Denton's ABC show Enough Rope in 2003. "There was no shortage of offers for anywhere in the world, whether it be France, Europe, Germany, America, and even Australian banks did some wonderful things at that stage."

The property developer was already making a name for himself in business circles with the creation of a national brewing business via the acquisitions starting with Perth's Swan Brewery, Castlemaine in Brisbane, and Toohey's in Sydney.

He now controlled most of Australia's beer market, and hoovered up most of Kalgoorlie's golden mile to become Australia's second largest gold producer.

The deal which really captured the heady atmosphere of the boom years came in 1987 with Bond's acquisition of Vincent van Gogh's Irises for $US53.9 million, making it the world's most expensive painting of the time.

Bond made the acquisition one month after the stock market crash that scarred the financial markets for years to come.

Years later, it was revealed that the deal was a sham. Sotheby's lent Bond half the purchase price and retained control of the painting until the colourful Australian finished paying for it. He never did.

The same year he splashed out on Van Gogh, Bond acquired the Nine Network from Kerry Packer for the then-exorbitant sum of $1 billion. Packer regained possession in 1990 at a fraction of the price when Bond went bust.

Packer's reported summation of the deal was one of his most famous: "You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I've had mine".  

Bond was not the only big name corporate raider to hit the skids when the boom years ended with the new decade.

Rupert Murdoch had a near-death experience with News Corp, and Australia's first billionaire, Robert Holmes-a-Court, who had never recovered from the 1987 stock market crash, died suddenly in 1990, just as the shutters were coming down on Australia's corporate cowboys and the equally careless banks.

Bond took control of Holmes à Court's Bell Resources in 1988, and used $1.2 billion of its cash reserves to prop up Bond Corp, which was drowning in debt.

It was not enough to save Bond Corp, or Bond himself from bankruptcy in 1992 with personal debts of $1.8 billion – the biggest personal bankruptcy Australia had seen.

At his bankruptcy hearing in 1994, Bond gained further notoriety due to his alleged memory loss.

Reporters couldn't keep count of all his "I don't know", "I just can't remember" and "I don't recall".

Bond offered the excuse that a succession of minor strokes had caused the brain damage that robbed his memory.

Outside the court, it was Bond's famous encounter with the current Media Watch host Paul Barry, which lives in media  memory.

Barry handed his business card to Bond, who subsequently threw it on to the ground and stomped on it. Clearly he had remembered the ABC journalist.

It was the siphoning of Bell's cash that saw Bond jailed for four years and stripped of his honour as an Officer of the Order of Australia. He was released in 2000.

Bond re-entered the BRW rich list in 2008 thanks to mining ventures in Africa, but he never regained his corporate standing.

Bond's life has been blighted by personal tragedy. His eldest daughter, Suzanne Bond, died just months after his release from prison.

"You don't get over those sorts of things. You learn to live with it, you don't get over it," he told the ABC's Andrew Denton about his daughter's death.

His second marriage, to Diana Bliss, ended in 2012 when she was found dead in the couple's swimming pool.

Bliss, who had suffered from depression, committed suicide.