Where have the quality fabrics gone?

Not only is it difficult to find an independant fabric store, but increasingly rarer still is a straight natural fibre cloth. I'm all for modern inventions and progress but when you live in a humid city which is warm 9 months of the year, polyester is never going to be your friend. I'm not searching for a rare animal here just your straight cottons, linens and wools. Yet find it increasingly difficult to locate anything not involving spandex of some kind. 

For a country which grows wool as a major product it's embarassing not to be able to find a plethora of fine wool fabrics, let alone even one that is not some horrible mix of wool and plastic. Aren't we also a major cotton producer? Yet I can't find anything of that fibre which doesn't have lambs or ragdolls printed on it. 

It's with great sadness that the majority of independant and fine fabric merchants have disappeared off the streets of Sydney, leaving those behind struggling to keep their doors open. Even sadder is to see the great disappearance of fabric choice from those stores as well. Economics dictating that they maintain very small amounts of fashionable colours and otherwise stock their shelves with white, black and grey. The one exception seems to be patchwork fabrics which now take up the major portion of most fabric stores.