In some ways, prepping is a reaction to how precarious our global supply chains have become, where a Trump tweet from Washington can impact an oil shipment to Esperance. We do not have a sufficient stockpile to deal with this for very long," she says. "Any escalation in the Syrian conflict, for example, could lead to a global oil crisis. My prepping friend's basement full of fuel seems less crazy when you learn that Australia doesn't stockpile fuel properly, despite being an island at the end of the Earth.ĭr Samantha Hepburn, an energy security expert from Deakin Law School, says Australia is "particularly vulnerable" as we import more than 90 per cent of our liquid fuel from the Middle East. We are all underpreparedĪustralians are, in many areas, dangerously underprepared - from our poor understanding of how to protect ourselves from natural disasters to the fact we're seriously underinsured.Īnd it's not just on an individual level. So, who should we really be mocking? Definitely me, and probably you too. "Urbanisation has largely removed the need to get our hands dirty - yet there is an almost primal desire to embrace the materiality of things." "If you take a step back, you can see that there is an underlying yearning that is met by behaviours," academic and author Mick Broderick told the Guardian. The giant balloon now seemed like some classic Aussie bush mechanics. Back in the city, I'd somehow managed to kill a plant specially chosen because it only needed watering every three months.Īs my prepper friend worked away, silhouetted in the torchlight, I realised preppers are just a variation on the "Aussie bushman" - perhaps a dying trope in our urban era, where the "unkillable" fern is my nursery's fastest-selling plant. I couldn't reboot their car, let alone scavenge bush tucker for dinner. My survival skills extended to holding a torch. They'd run out of water and were bracing themselves for a night in the bush.Īs I performed my important role of "torch holder" in the Wolf Creek-esque carpark, I suddenly got it: preppers exist because the rest of us are critically underprepared. When we reached the carpark, the kids were starving. "They are certainly not reflective of those colourful individuals seen in scripted and heavily edited American reality TV." "Australian survivalists are not Christian fundamentalists, right-wing nationalists, racist extremists or part of a contemporary militia movement," he says. It doesn't help that we've lost a lot of the visual cues that we're ready for disaster: while cities were once littered with bomb shelters and nuclear bunkers, in a digital world, our "readiness" is largely invisible.Īs Dr Lee Stickells from the University of Sydney writes, "in the context of global climate change, ongoing fiscal crises and pandemics, the survival retreat starts to seem like an eccentric but understandable reaction."ĭr Simon Henry, whose PhD investigated Australian preppers, says the subculture is a broad church. When fear drives the clicks that keep cash-starved newsrooms ticking over, anxiety is virtually built into journalism's business model. "Preppers' outlooks reflect a bombardment of reporting around disasters on a daily basis … so we should pay attention to how speculation around disasters has become part of everyday life in the early 21st century", he says. Japanese companies are marketing home nuclear shelters to the general public. And yes, preppers have more acronyms than the public service. If you're a minimalist prepper who's just read Marie Kondo, you might get by with just the BOB (" Bug Out Bag", 72 hours worth of supplies) and the INCH (" I'm Never Coming Home" bag). Preppers make themselves easy targets, between the YouTube tutorials on how to make a crossbow from a ski, and the graded sequence of Mary-Poppins-meets-Bear-Grylls survival bags. This is despite "preppers" being widely met with ridicule or fear (as the New York Times writes, prepping reality TV shows "are full of people lovingly cradling their weaponry, which in many cases is frighteningly extensive"). "Doomsday prepping", or "survivalism", is on the rise in Australia, as it is in the US and UK. I'm not convinced it's a world I want to live in. In my Gollum-crouch, I grab the floss and try to imagine a world where that could be "my precious". "Gum health and heart disease are linked," he says. An avalanche of toothbrushes and dental floss rains down on me.Ĭrouched on the caravan floor, gathering up the toothbrushes like an apocalyptic "pick-up sticks", I stare up at the prepper, waiting for an explanation. There's two months of tinned food and an axe. I lift the bed to stash my bags underneath. Making myself at home in the catastrophe-ready caravan.
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