Do you do the flight from hell often?Last week was my second time in Perth. I enjoyed (again) being at the lag end of the radio announcers’ roll call of the times of day. There’s something quite satisfying about being at the very beginning of your day, when others are a few hours in.

Perth is a city of extremes. In the summer the heat is fierce: hard to imagine a dry heat of 40C and above from a wet subtropical heat in Queensland. And then there’s the distance. It’s closer to Indonesia than it is to the east coast of Australia. It’s on the same time zone as Singapore. A standard road trip in Western Australia is not uncommonly more than 1000k. Oliver Burkeman said in his column that this distance could work in your advantage — that you were more likely to be taken seriously.

It’s also an enormously wealthy city — or at least it was until very recently when the mining boom on which its wealth was built began to wind down. With its huge skyscrapers, it still exudes confidence and a degree of brashness that gives it a different tone to other Australian cities I’ve visited (I haven’t yet made it to Darwin — I’m still hoping to so I can see for myself if it is true that crocodiles roam the city centre there).

But this wealth is built on a huge, mobile workforce who are now just coming to terms with the fact that the money won’t be there for ever. These workers, mostly in the mining industry, but also in associated industries, were well paid — often very well paid — but life was not easy and often required travel across this vast continent on a weekly basis.

So back to the “flight from hell” — or the over nighter from Perth to the east coast. A completely full plane, rigid seats, scant food and just the merest nod to the fact that this was a time for sleep. My right hand neighbour in work boots and fluorescent work clothes was better prepared than most with designer eyeshades. Pretty much everyone else — all on their way home it seemed — were just resigned to how it was: just a commute.

The flight at least was fast, very fast — almost frightening so as the vagaries of the wind across the continent on this night cut the time by 30 minutes.

I was glad to be back, surprisingly jet lagged but at least back in a more familiar place. And with some sense of the toll on the people who’ve criss-crossed the continent over the years in pursuit, but also in service of the boom that gave Perth its wealth, and who now face an uncertain future.