If outlanders tend to associate Australia with kangaroos, broad-brim leather hats and an opera house, many Australians are different. They think of iron ore and bauxite, copper and coal, nickel, gold and uranium, a trove of mineral riches that is their nation's birthright and the bedrock of its prosperity.

Australia vetoed part of a $1.8 billion bid for Oz, a large zinc miner, because the military raised the prospect of Chinese espionage at an Oz mine not far from an aerospace test site.

Which explains much of the breast-beating that has ensued since the Chinese announced plans this year to buy a big chunk of it.

Since three state owned Chinese companies said they would buy stakes in Australia's storied mining industry totaling $22 billion - as much as China's entire investment here in the last three years - some of this nation's 21.3 million people have reacted with aggrieved nationalism.

The government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, which generally favors the sales, has been savaged as naïvely cozy with China, a view some in his own military appear to share. Opposition politicians have flogged the specter of an Australian future more or less as a giant open-pit mine in which the locals toil, but Beijing takes the profits.