Things have meaning in part because of the way we see things, based on our own historical context.  An example is the conception of Australia as the Lucky Country  because it was the world's quarry.  Donald Horne, who coined the Lucky Country phrase,   used it in an  ironical mode. 

Horne was critiquing an Australia that did not think for itself; a country manacled to its past; and 'still in colonial blinkers'. It was meant as an indictment of an unimaginative nation, its cosy provincialism, its cultural cringe, its second rate politicians,  and its White Australia policy.  Horne's irony is usually  overlooked. 

Old resource based Australia  is  a particular  historical pattern of vision. A week in Andamooka, in northern South Australia indicated that  it was a strange place--a frontier land. The town was full of mine tailings  as was the surrounding landscape. This was a quarry economy. It  indicated  mining's "boom and bust" economics,  and  that  mining, by its nature, involves the environmental damage to  the land. This  often has serious consequences for the surrounding environment. 

The inequality between Australian regions has been growing as a result of the  10-year mining boom in the first decade of the 21st century.  The boom has benefitted all regions in Western Australia; two regions in Queensland, mainly Mackay and the Central West region; and half of the NSW Outer Hunter region.  The boom pushed up the dollar and made it hard for  the manufacturing industries  to  compete internationally.  So South Australia's industrialized economy declines as manufacturing goes offshore and  it becomes the rust bucket state.  Adelaide  enters the post-industrial.  

The period of industrialisation in Australia --the 1950-70s- is associated with a  modernist art photography became concerned to analyze its self  in order to come up with its own “inherent properties.” It is through this process, modernists held,  that  photographic art achieves “purity”,  and can then create something totally “unobtainable from any other source.” Photography  is about photography.  

Adelaide's post-industrial state meant that the creative industries in Adelaide are metaphor rather than a reality.  The artists  live in rental properties,  and trawl through char­ity shops, street markets and jumble sales for delectable morsels of decaying culture-matter.  Modern arts struggle with industrialisation (eg.,  Fluxus) had  long been forgotten and  a disruptive  digital technology was just over the horizon.