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Comment by hfsktr | Hacker News Reader

I didn't see it mentioned but how do they survive? I am assuming that the mining is like freelance work and they sell whatever they find...but to who? The way it read this is a remote place, where do they get food (I assume not much grows in that terrain)[0]?

Even if people worked with other residents for favors/barters instead of money the food thing much be ridiculously expensive to import all of it.

I can imagine hitting that one jackpot find but at the same time not getting one seems like it would be impossible to survive for long.

[0]This kind of applies to most of Australia I imagine though.

I wish they hadn't filtered all the photos but that's nothing to do with the place.

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(I assume not much grows in that terrain)[0]

Not quite.

Australian farmers and graziers own 135,997 farms, covering 61% of Australia's landmass.[1]

We are able to export more than half of our agricultural produce, while more than 90 per cent of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, milk and eggs sold in supermarkets are domestically produced.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Australia

2. http://www.agriculture.gov.au/ag-farm-food/food

Fun fact: *opium poppy industry in Tasmania – which produces about 40% of the world’s legal

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6667-morphine-free-po...

I had never seen an image of Australia with grass. I've always seen desert or city (like Sydney). It just never entered my mind that green stuff grew there. My geography knowledge is horrid so I just figured whatever I saw on tv/images was what it was like all over. Really cool that it's not actually the case.

That's interesting - I thought our tourism board advertised our beaches, huge rainforests in the north and big wine regions down south pretty widely.

There is a lot of desert but that's pretty much all in the middle of the country where almost nobody lives.

Same as most other places. A single 18 wheeler can transport 60,000+ lb of stuff. Which is more than most small town grocery store. As to buying and selling these are cheap to ship and there are probably several wholesaler's in town.

Don't forget they can still order stuff from Amazon it's not in Antarctica or something.

PA: Australia is somewhat famious for using road trains due to the how much stuff they ship to remote areas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train

Didn't really think about Amazon. I had never heard of a road train either. Didn't even know that one truck would carry that much. Learning a lot already :)

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