That sense - of difference capped with superiority, of isolation mixed with truculence - still informs the state oddly known as Western Australia. (Why, then, South rather than Southern Australia?) Our repertoire of stories from the Denmark-Northam-Three Springs-Kojonup-Harvey-Manjimup-Perth side of the family is replete with edgy, grudging put-downs of folk from "over East". One matriarch maintained that there were no criminals in the West before bitumen was laid on the highway to Ceduna. Any West Australian playing for a national team was carrying his mates.

Tasmania and Queensland take pride in their quiddities, while Adelaide residents still preen themselves on their lack of convict heritage or grades at St Peter's College. No other place in Australia, though, possesses the feeling of entitlement evident in Perth. A Perthling can talk with a straight face about "our" iron ore, as though she had been out with pick and shovel first thing in the morning digging up a truckload. Perth people continue to whinge about inequities in "our" GST rebates, or the AFL's quite logical refusal to shift its grand final to Perth. "Great" is an adjective so over-used in Western Australia as to appear in the title of an administrative district.

The same reflex parochialism underpinned arguments that pastoral leases should come cheap, that gold, unlike any other mineral, should not be taxed (during the 1980s) or that the state should sulkily secede from Australia (1933).

Aggressive whining is not a pretty default response. Imagine Max Gillies in his satirical prime, taking off Palaszczuk and McGowan out-doing each other in a race to the bottom with strident, retro populism. Or consider, as a simple thought experiment, Western Australia without iron ore.

All Australians have a vested interest in selling as much of the Pilbara to China as quickly as possible. 892.5 million tonnes of ore was carted off last year for an irreplaceable income of $1136.3 billion. Nonetheless, Australians east of the Nullarbor recognise that good fortune rather than good management is involved. Over East, folk may even acknowledge the continuing truth in Donald Horne's aphorism that we are a lucky country, able to live off its luck.

Entitlement is not due simply to having minerals to dig up or being the most isolated city in the world. However distinct and peculiar Tasmania might be, or Queensland in days past, people growing up in those states know they have to leave. The horizon is too low, good jobs too scarce, careers too constricted. The Commonwealth public service used to comprise the revenge of federation, when key departments were staffed by clever exiles from the smaller, poorer states. Anyone living in Sydney or Melbourne felt no need of Canberra; they had jobs available at home, as well as the conviction that they already lived in the heart of Australia.

By contrast, in Perth staying put or coming home have been credible options. Over West, everyone seems to know everyone else - since forever. Word of mouth flourishes, school and family ties remain intact, wealthy residents cluster in a few suburbs, the powers that be are called by their given names, and whiffs of a more cloistered, cocooned past persist.

No unifying national myth unites Western Australia with the other states. While Canadians have created a heroic story about their transcontinental railway, ours was just part of the bill for Federation. History books recall gold rushes in Bendigo and Ballarat rather than Kalgoorlie. Western Australia boasts only one prime minister, and he was a transplant (as the Premier now is). In the eastern states, there has sometimes been a disposition to regard with amused scepticism Western Australian notables with unduly big reputations at home.

In my last visit, I ran into one true epitome of the pioneer spirit. An older lady at Mingenew had gathered her family around her as a cyclone hit the town. In the most laconic fashion, she told me that the back wall had blown in, then the roof had been torn off. Instead of complaining, she observed that, while temperatures remained mild, she was coping fine under a tarpaulin.

Coping with boom-bust cycles entails difficult balancing, in Western Australia as in, say, Scotland, Norway or Texas. In all those cases, outsiders might well ask if enough money has been set aside. We might query whether plans to build a future - in skills, infrastructure, time frames or innovative industries - are ambitious enough.

I was once asked to lecture a PNG minister on the risks in dissipating revenues from a resources boom. He drolly drew my attention to the Porgera goldfield, a landslip then mined by locals carrying a Nescafe coffee jar (to put nuggets in) and a machete (to protect themselves). The lucky few who found gold, the minister explained, usually bought a pick-up truck, filling the tray with slabs of beer. Assuming the erstwhile miner could drive, then find a road to his home village, he would park the truck under a tree, where it would rust, then sit with his mates to drink all the beer. Was that, this minister waspishly asked, an illustration of dissipating revenues from a resources boom?

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