Once known mainly for its mines, it has, in the 42 years since the Margaret River region grew its first grapes, become renowned for producing some of Australia's finest wines.
But who among us doggedly seeks it out — hunts down the half-baked idea, the simplistic shortcut, the embarrassing misstep — and mines it for its teaching value?
His elderly friend Inez gives him $15,000 of the reparation money she got for being held in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, but his campaign is half-hearted and despairing from the beginning, and Mr. Beatty mines it mostly for its satirical potential.
Areva gets much of its uranium from the two mines it operates in the country, at Arlit and Imouraren.
Supported in its heyday by rich copper mines, it was home to more than 10,000 people in the 1920s.
But with its rust-belt manufacturing industries and coal mines, it has also suffered disproportionately from Britain's 20th-century recessions.
Bruce Gilbert's music isn't awfully inspiring, with its relentless, windscreen-wiper washes of sound, yet Clark mines it for extraordinary textures and patterns.
When there were mines, it was coal.
Most have wounds from shrapnel and land mines, it said.
The country has four mines; it is to gem diamonds what Cuba is to cigars.
"Nobody has ever compiled a directory of abandoned mines," it said.
