Young people no longer earning mega mining bucks may not earn too much sympathy, but they're part of a bigger story: what happens after the mining and construction booms? What happens to the miners and builders?

Youth unemployment is high, and young people in Australia today are tipped to be the first generation since the Great Depression to be worse off than their parents.

Men in the mining and construction industries could be the worst affected.

"The story of the last 15 years on the male side of the economy is the big boom in construction work and in the mining sector as well," says George Megalogenis, who spoke with Hack after the release of his Quarterly Essay 'Australia Between Recession and Renewal'.

Construction is now the number one employer of men - we're now at the end of the mining boom and we're getting to the end of the property boom. What happens to those guys?"

And he warns that mass unemployment always has a political cost.

"People might remember back to Hanson era - a lot of that story began with manufacturing workers losing their jobs in the so-called 'recession we had to have'."

A tale of two FIFOers

In South Australia and Western Australia, Hack met two former miners adjusting to life after the boom. Their stories are quite different, but they've each been shaped by the downturn.

Their experiences are not meant to be a comprehensive survey, but glimpses of what it's been like for a generation of young mechanics and electricians and fitters-and-turners who enjoyed once-in-a-lifetime high salaries.

Rohan Kurtzer, 23, from Adelaide, began earning $100,000 straight out of high school. After a few years of great-paying FIFO work he took a voluntary redundancy and went travelling around the world, thinking the mining boom would still be there when he got back.

It wasn't.

John Todd, 21, completed his four-year electrician's apprenticeship in Perth the year the boom collapsed. He was sacked after only five months on the mines. He then burnt through his savings when he was out of work, and says he'll never go back to mining ever again.

"I seemed to get into the industry at the complete wrong time," says John

"I was too late, unfortunately."

Rohan has found it harder to adjust to losing his FIFO job.

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Whatsapp John Todd.

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Whatsapp Rohan Kurtzer.

"I came home and tried the 9-5 life and really struggled," says Rohan, now 23. "I didn't like waking up at six and being in the rat race for half the money."

I was spun out to see how normal people lived."

He says he doesn't know if he function any more in a "normal job".

"I just think gee that's a really good job," he says of the job he got five years ago, straight out of school.

"I wonder if there'll ever be jobs like that again."

Will there ever be jobs like that again?

Probably not anytime soon.

To find the wealth of Western Australia's mining boom, you can go to a nondescript gravel yard on the industrial fringe of Perth, where six million dollars worth of trucks and loaders, of cranes and utes and portable buildings is to be sold at auction.

It's a buyer's market, says Jack Gregson, director of Gregsons Auctioneers - one of about seven auction houses in Perth dealing in mining and civil equipment.

Here the equipment amassed over a decade of anomalously high commodities prices is going under the hammer in million-dollar fortnightly liquidation fire sales.

The sight of cranes and utes and portable donga accommodation branded with corporate logos is rare visual proof of the massive scale of the bust - a collapse that that has largely been played out far from the cities and towns, and far from public view, on remote FIFO mines.

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Whatsapp A worker at the INPEX-operated Ichthys project Bladin Point gas processing facility near Darwin.

In 2011 iron prices began a jagged fall from a high of US$180 a tonne. Other commodities followed. This marked the beginning of the end of the boom.

The iron ore price is now a bit over $50 - and this is still higher than the historical average price before the boom. It could fall further.

From 2012 to 2015 the mining industry in Western Australia shed almost a quarter of its workforce - about 20,000 people.

Meanwhile, state debt has spiraled to $39 billion and Western Australia has the highest level of average household debt of any state - $189,000 according to a recent estimate.

"It wasn't quick cut," says Jack.

"It wasn't as if on Monday we had hundreds of phone calls to sell equipment. It happened over a year or so. It was very slow.

"It might have been equipment hire companies that were first to experience the struggle - there was no construction, so no hire equipment, and then it slowly rolled through to the transport industry - when nothing is happening people don't need transport equipment.

"It flows down from your top people, your major mining conglomerates. The construction projects come to an end and suddenly they don't need the smaller people."

We've seen people drop off expensive cars and then see if they can buy a cheaper one from the same auction."

Two years ago, there was a run of news stories about young miners urgently selling jet skis and high-powered utes to service their mortgages.

But far more significant, says Jack, are the rows of cranes up for auction.

"When you see a crane up for sale you're definitely seeing say 30 employees out of work," he says.

"A business can be 10 or 50 people and then when you extrapolate that to family you could be talking about 100 or 200 people affected."

The boom is well and truly over, but the impact of this is staggered - Jack expects the liquidation sales to continue for at least another two years.

In other words, the real scale of what happened is only emerging now.

What John and Rohan are doing now

John is now working in construction while Rohan has gone back to mining - he's found work on a drive in, drive out underground operation in South Australia. The pay isn't as good as when he was doing FIFO, but it's better than working retail.

He has a shotfirer's licence, which means he's qualified to detonate explosives at mine sites. He doesn't have any other degree or qualification.

He's also spent most of the money he earned during the boom times.

Both John and Rohan are members of a Facebook page called Fifo man, run by a 33-year-old Bundaberg-based former FIFO worker, Luke Baker.

The page, which has 17,000 likes, focuses on FIFO mental health issues.

Luke says he's concerned about young former FIFOers who have been left exposed by the collapse of the mining boom at a time of high youth unemployment.

"All of a sudden there's no more work out there - particularly for anyone who doesn't have experience. You're then back home and looking for work in the real world - which is completely different to the resources industry.

"They have no experience back in the real world.

I guess it's going from a champagne lifestyle to nothing."

While Rohan is willing to go back to FIFO but hasn't had any offers, John says he won't ever go back to what he sees as the uncertainty of FIFO work. He recently turned down an offer of full-time FIFO work.

He says the experience of being abruptly sacked has taught him to value job security.

"The insecurity in FIFO is that as soon as the resource price goes down the company cuts cost," he says.

"In construction there's more transparency. You know a job will take x amount of time and you will be in the job for this amount of time."

"It's not absolute but better than 'we'll see how it goes' - which is how it is in mining."