The Gamerstable podcast (Shannon I think) did address that Mad Max was Australian. And the main moderator of the podcast (Eric?) brought up Mary Shelley's The Last Man.
I haven't had the opportunity to read it yet, but speaking of 'Australian' post apoc media there is the novel On The Beach (1957) written by a British-Australian author. Two movies based on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)Anyway a
Red Market's Idea inspired by their podcast is the idea that every body (corpse) tells a story.
We've seen this in Fallout all the time and more demonstratively in Fallout New Vegas Honest Hearts DLC, where the story of the pre-war Survivalist is told through notes left at supply caches. Most players found this story arc more compelling than the main arc for Honest Hearts.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Survivalist_hidden_cacheThis isn't a new idea. Very rarely some DMs that have a real ecological and holistic sense of their D&D dungeons will do this; where you find scattered treasure, the remains of a pack and then further down some yawning lonely corridor you find the body of the adventure with his magic sword.
Edit: Come to think of it the position of bodies and what they have on them is critically important to the stories in the Souls series, including Bloodborne. (See the Prepare to Cry series by VaatiVidya:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWLedd0Zw3c5SCqzfFpcy82pfliyAu2kl)
But I think linking history to loot really hits home the idea of the player's mortality and subtly amps up the fear, which is specifically useful in a economic horror games like Red Markets.
Every gain the players make is from the bones someone else's failure. Someone who had hopes and goals like them. And it raises the question subconsciously; how long until the player's luck runs out and their only utility for the next generation is the number of unspoiled powerbars they carried with them and if they expired in a convenient place?
In the current (Episode 1) Red Market podcast, Caleb uses this technique by putting a bunch of bounty on a Captain Morgan cardboard cutout that has become half records of the missing, half shrine for the deceased. The juxtaposition of gritty depression with the comedy of hauling a larger than life pirate picture around the Loss because it is worth more than it's weight in gold is typical Caleb (typically Stokesian?
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I think Red Markets (or a supplement) would benefit greatly by at least a 1d100 table for comic/disturbing/depressing corpses to find loot on (bounty) where the body tells a story/the loot had critical meaning to the perished. Be real useful for a GM (Market) and double as adventure seeds.
