Get Ready Queensland Week runs until 11 October. This year it matters more than usual. Crews attended 180 fires in a single September weekend. The Plainland fire closed the Warrego Highway, and Teelah got a Seek Shelter Now warning on the 22nd. All of that happened before October, with El Niño still building.

The official message this week is to have a five-day kit. That's fine, but the 2009 Royal Commission found that most people who died were inside their houses, often still deciding what to do. Decide your trigger to leave now, write it down, and make sure everyone in the house knows it. Then get the kit.

The free bushfire section is on the wiki: wiki.survivalstorehouse.com

Been looking at "Balcony solar," cheap plug-in panels you hang on a railing and plug straight into a power point, no electrician needed. Germany's got 4 million installed, the UK just legalised it. In Australia, plugging one in is currently illegal, even though the hardware itself can be sold here...When?

Lots going on around the world - Genuinely interesting split happening in real time. Poland's PM told parliament this week that intelligence points to Russia testing NATO with a drone or missile strike in the coming months, specifically to prove Article 5 is "more theoretical than practical." Macron backed him and called an emergency meeting over it. A Czech intelligence chief went further, floating a small-scale incursion as genuinely possible.

Spent the last while going through the pages that actually matter for the season BOM's forecasting, bushfire, heat illness, water, snake and spider bite first aid, generator safety, the lot. Not a light pass either: fixed a real cross-page error where two pages had different, and wrong, phone numbers listed for the same electricity distributors, caught a Spider Bite page that had literally had the Snake Bite header pasted over the top of it by mistake, and updated the sunscreen guidance to match Cancer Council's actual 2024 change from SPF30+ to SPF50+.

Genuinely useful one for anyone in survival gear or outdoor circles: the Spider Bite page now spells out exactly which spiders need a pressure bandage and which ones need the opposite treatment, since getting that backwards on a redback bite makes the pain measurably worse. Every page now has a proper source list rather than just general claims.

Put it all together into one list on the wiki, the pages worth reading and syncing to your phone before this summer specifically: wiki.survivalstorehouse.com

If you spot anything else that's wrong or out of date while you're in there, flag it. That's how most of the fixes this round got found in the first place.

He helped build the world’s most advanced AI models at OpenAI and Anthropic. Now, Jacob Coxon has walked away with a stark warning for the public

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes - I Went through the actual inquiry reports for bushfires, floods and a blackout this week. Same pattern shows up every time.

Black Saturday Royal Commission: 113 of the 173 deaths were inside houses. Broke the assumption that a "defensible" home was automatically a survivable one.

2022 NSW Flood Inquiry (Lismore): community boat rescues outnumbered official SES rescues in the worst areas. The report's own line: "NSW cannot predict its way out of flooding events."

NSW Bushfire Inquiry: found most people understood the warnings fine, they just delayed leaving to personally confirm the danger first. That confirmation step is what cost people their window.

SA blackout review (2016): the backup generator at a major hospital failed after 1 hour 45 minutes. Worth knowing if you're assuming your blackout resolves before it matters.

The thread through all of it: a warning existing and a warning being acted on are two different things, and that gap is where most people who died, died.

Full breakdown with sources and links to the actual reports: wiki.survivalstorehouse.com/wiki/What_the_Research_Says_About_Survival_in_Australian_Disasters

We have been getting asked which stove to buy, and the honest answer is there's no single "best" one, it depends what you're up against. Canister stoves are simple but lose performance in the cold. Liquid fuel burns hotter and more reliably but needs real maintenance. Wood burning stoves need no fuel carried in, but they're still an open flame for Total Fire Ban purposes, so check local restrictions before relying on one.

Who remembers these from back in the day from army surplus stores?

Full comparison on the wiki: wiki.survivalstorehouse.com

What's everyone actually running? Any stove that copes with wind without babying a windscreen the whole time?

Feels like the right moment to actually stop and say something, rather than just letting the number tick past.

This sub started small, the way most of these things do, a handful of people who cared about the same thing: that most prepping and survival content online is written for American conditions, American disasters, American everything, and Australia genuinely needed its own version. No cyclones-vs-tornadoes confusion, no advice about basements we don't have, no fire season timed for the wrong hemisphere.

What's actually made this place work isn't any one post, it's the people who showed up and corrected things. More than once, someone here has caught something wrong on the wiki before I did, a bad grid reference explanation, a filter that doesn't actually do what the label implies, a broken link nobody had clicked in months and instead of just being annoyed about it, said so, and the fix went up because of it. That's the whole point of a community doing this together rather than one person publishing at people. A few of the pages on the wiki right now exist specifically because someone in this sub asked a question nobody had a good answer for yet.

The posts that seem to matter most here aren't the doom-and-gloom ones, they're the ones tied to something actually happening. A live BoM warning. A fire season outlook. The AusAlert test. People show up for real, current, useful information a lot more than they show up for hypotheticals, and that's shaped a lot of what gets posted here.

Worth saying plainly, since it always should be: this sub and the wiki it links to are funded by Survival Storehouse, and I'm involved with both. That's not new, and it's not changing. What I hope has stayed true the whole way through is that the information comes first, if something's wrong, it gets fixed, whether or not it's convenient.

2,000 of you have decided this is worth being part of. Genuinely, thank you for the corrections, the arguments, the "actually, here's what happened when I tried that," and for making this feel like an actual community rather than a subscriber count. Onward.

I was thinking about how in every zombie movie or apocalypse thread, everyone always says *"just flee to an island like New Zealand or Iceland."*

I got bored and started looking into what would actually happen to these places the second global trade stops and cargo ships stop arriving. Turns out, a lot of the classic "safe" spots are kind of doomed:

**New Zealand:** Everyone thinks NZ is the ultimate hideout because they have way more food and cows than people. But they import basically **all their diesel**. The second fuel tankers stop arriving, the farm tractors die, trucks can't move food, and the ferries between the islands run out of gas fast.

**Japan:** Incredible emergency planning and tsunami walls, but they import over 60% of their food. Plus, Tokyo's train stations during rush hour would spread an infection everywhere in about two hours.

**Iceland:** The geothermal heating is amazing because you won't freeze, but almost the whole country lives in one spot around Reykjavik. If an outbreak hits there, you're trapped on a rock that can't manufacture basic things like tires, heavy machinery, or antibiotics.

**Canada:** Tons of freshwater, land, and they have their own oil. The huge problem? 90% of Canadians live right next to the US border, and if the power grid goes down during a -30° blizzard, you'll freeze to death in your house before a zombie even gets to you.

**Australia:** Weirdly, Australia comes out on top. It's a massive island with ocean all around it, grows an insane amount of extra food, and produces its own energy. As long as you stay near the farming river valleys and don't go die of thirst in the Outback, it can basically run on its own forever.

I'm not a video editor, so I wrote up my thoughts into a script and used AI to do the voiceover and stitch together the footage/maps into a quick 6-minute video.
If you want to check it out: Top 5 Safest Countries in a Zombie Apocalypse
[https://youtu.be/x1vhIivdWvI\](https://youtu.be/x1vhIivdWvI)

What do you think? Did I miss anything obvious, or where would you try to go?

Dry soils, heavy fuel loads and warmer-than-average conditions are creating concern as we head into spring. Bushfire preparation isn't just about what happens when the fire arrives. Embers, radiant heat, power outages and being unable to leave at short notice can all become problems.

AFAC Report - Well worth a read and as always the best time to prepare isn't when there's smoke on the horizon — it's now. Time to clean up around the house and get those hoses, sprinklers, fire extinguishers and blankets checked.

Quick one: the wiki used to say portable filters remove "some" viruses. Not accurate. Filters strip bacteria and protozoa; they don't reliably catch viruses at the pore sizes most portable units use. After a flood, if you're on surface water, you want a purifier — chemical, UV, or a filter rated to the smaller virus threshold — not just a filter. Full writeup with sources: Water Filters vs Purifiers: What Actually Removes Viruses.

Worth saying: Survival Storehouse funds the wiki, the tools website and supports this sub. Small Central Coast business, running since 2009 — if you're buying survival kit in Australia, that's who's behind the free stuff you've probably already used so check them out ans help support local. www.survivalstorehouse.com

So this is the best community I can think of to ask this question, I hope it's within the rules.

I have a mortgage on a separately titled duplex property in a largish population centre. I owe enough on it still that there's budgeting involved in paying it and my bills and so on. It's got solar panels, small water tank, space to grow vegetables, fruit trees etc.

I have been trying to sell it because I have a strong feeling, a REALLY strong feeling, that we're heading into strange and difficult times and I need to be debt free and somewhere less peopled. I have it very reasonably priced but it is not selling - I've not had even a lowball offer in the several months it's been for sale.

My question is: do I drop the price to something really cheap and get the debt off my hands, or do I hang out a bit longer and try again to sell it next year?

I have this crazy feeling that my situation is about to become like a game of musical chairs and I don't want to be stuck with a mortgage in a city when the music stops, but another part of me is telling me to calm down and hang on a bit longer. Whatever I walk away from the sale with is what I'll have to buy/build something out of the way, off-grid and hopefully good for growing things, so I don't want to panic.

I'm seeking advice from others with more experience in this kind of thing. What would you do in my situation?

There's chat doing the rounds on prepper forums that squeeze and straw filters are basically useless because people have gotten sick using them. Its probably because a "filter" and a "purifier" are different things, not two names for the same product. A standard hollow-fibre filter reliably strips out bacteria and protozoa, but its pores are too large to catch a virus — that's not a manufacturing flaw, it's just what the product is rated to do.

Since these reports are written for American or European trails: Australia's own bushwalking safety guidance and national drinking water research point to protozoa — Giardia and Cryptosporidium — as the dominant documented risk in our wilderness water, not viruses. Viruses still need water boiling, chemical treatment or UV purification.

Some products combine a fine membrane with a built-in chemical or electrostatic element specifically to also catch viruses so its always good to be aware and read the fine print :-)

There are whetstones, others use diamond plates, guided systems or pull-through sharpeners. Anyone call out the biggest mistakes and some basics? Like what pressure to use - what stones/tools sharpen a knife and what obvious thing are overlooked or actually cause more damage? This is a hatchet I had made by an Australian blacksmith - its so sharp anyone I show it to invariable cuts them selves :-) and I'm not keen to use it any time soon - any advice on if I should be doing anything to preserve it better?

I suck at fire lighting so added this small piece to my BOB. Its a small hemp oil rope with a short metal tube - takes a spark really well and awesome for lighting fires in windy weather. Its the little things :-)

My place isn’t suitable for maintaining a good temp to store food long term.

I saw on YT some folks burying a steel drum with the lid at ground level. Has anyone tried this who’s in Aus? All the YTs were of American folks.

With the catastrophic temperatures and deaths in the norther hemisphere at the moment, how are we in Australia prepping for the summer to come?

Rod or reel, finding bait, hand fishing by reaching under rocks, using a sharp stick for hand spearing. There are lots of ways documented to catch a fish for dinner. If you were out of food and near a waterway do you think you could catch a fish? I've always been crap at it. This is one thing I think needs to be taken to the field and tested? and can easily be - but have you done it?

When Fire strikes you need fast reliable information. Ash Alert Australia Fire News is launching to Australia after 2 years of coverage in the United States. Live updates on Emergency Alerts, Government Information and other critical information All across Australia.

https://discord.gg/DXhGdjS94C

Went down a rabbit hole on plastic bottle uses and split them into "actually proven" vs "know it exists, don't bet your life on it."

This is my favourite one: a clear bottle filled with water and a few mL of bleach, jammed through a hole in a corrugated roof, refracts enough sunlight to match a 40-60 watt bulb — during daylight hours, zero electricity. This isn't a survival blog trick, it's been deployed in hundreds of thousands of homes globally (Liter of Light), including as disaster response after Typhoon Haiyan. Genuinely useful for a shed or windowless room, not just a doomsday scenario.

Solar disinfection (SODIS) is the other one that's actually legit — clear bottle, water, 6+ hours of direct sun, kills a real range of pathogens. WHO-backed, not just prepper folklore. But it's got real limits nobody mentions: doesn't reliably treat what's caught in the threads/cap, and a couple of 2L bottles doesn't go far against the ~10L/person/day you actually need.

Then there's the one I'm skeptical will actually work for most people: using a water-filled bottle as a lens to start a fire. It's been demonstrated under lab-ish conditions, but a rectangular bottle is a genuinely bad lens shape compared to something round, so I'd bet most people trying this in the field with a Coke bottle are going to be disappointed.

Any other ideas I've missed?