ABSTRACT
There is a widespread piece of conventional wisdom which says that Perth is doing well from contemporary mining booms in Western Australia. This paper is a critique of that assumption and can be read at two levels. First, it can be read for the empirical evidence provided on the impact of resource development on Perth. In writing the paper however, I have been equally concerned with a problem of theory - namely, the uncritical application of a centre-periphery notion (whether orthodox or class-based) to explain the relationship between Perth and its regions. Since the richest of these ideas are those derived from world-system and dependency theories, the analysis can be read at a second level which primarily addresses the extent to which Perth can be understood as one link in a chain of dependency relations.( 1 )
