Perth

Perth is the most isolated major city on Earth—closer to Singapore than to Sydney, a three-hour flight from Adelaide, the nearest Australian metropolis. That isolation was the point. When Captain James Stirling arrived in 1827 and declared the Swan River country 'as beautiful as anything of this kind I had ever witnessed,' he was scouting for a colony so remote that neither convicts nor competing European powers would threaten it. In 1829, he established Australia's first free-settler colony, funded by private capital rather than imperial coffers—a founding philosophy that still shapes Western Australian attitudes toward the eastern states.

The Whadjuk Noongar people had called this place Boorloo for tens of thousands of years before the British arrived. Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh had discovered the Swan River in 1697, and French explorers visited in 1801, but both left unimpressed. Stirling saw what they missed: a Mediterranean climate, fertile river flats, and strategic position on the Indian Ocean. The colonial ceremony on 12 August 1829 began with Helen Dance chopping down a tree—a foundation act commemorated by a plaque in Barrack Street. But the free-settler experiment nearly failed. By 1850, the colonists were so desperate for labor that they requested convicts, reversing the founding principle.

For a century, Perth remained a remote outpost sustained by wool, wheat, and gold discoveries at Kalgoorlie in the 1890s. The city's transformation began in the 1960s when iron ore exports to Japan created the first mining boom. The pattern repeated with each commodity cycle: iron ore, natural gas, and the China-driven supercycle of the 2000s that turned Perth into one of the world's wealthiest cities. By 2012, mining engineers earned more than doctors; fly-in-fly-out workers commuted to Pilbara mines that extracted 98.9% of Australia's iron ore.

Today Perth is home to 2.1 million people and serves as headquarters for an industry that generates 60% of Western Australia's export value. Iron ore alone earned the state over A$100 billion annually at peak prices; mining investment reached A$33 billion in 2024-25. The median house price has climbed to A$832,000, second only to Sydney. But Perth's economy remains a leveraged bet on China's steel demand and commodity prices—when iron ore prices fall, the city feels it immediately. The isolation that once protected Perth now means 80% of Western Australia's population is concentrated in a single urban area dependent on a single industry.

By 2026, Perth faces the familiar question of resource cities: what happens when the mines slow down? The state is investing in critical minerals, rare earths, and lithium to power the energy transition, but the fundamental pattern hasn't changed. Perth's wealth flows from holes in the ground hundreds of kilometers away, processed through the most isolated logistics hub in the developed world. The city's future depends on whether the next commodity cycle arrives before the current one ends.