Resources
This page lists many resources that can help you to learn about the kinds of things that you see on survival.org.au. The resources are listed under the following categories:
Books
Movies, Video, DVD and Audio
Material on the Web
Survival and Nature Courses
Permaculture Courses
Equipment
Spiritual and Psychology
Peak Oil
Peak Oil Groups
Sponsors
I came very close to scrapping survival.org.au in winter 2009 due to financial difficulties. Since then I have decided that the site has to pay its way (or at least some of it) if it is going to stay.
If you buy anything from any of the dealers reached by clicking on the banners below, you will help to keep survival.org.au alive and on the internet.
Books
Movies, Video, DVD, and Audio
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Patch From Scratch & Cottage Gardens, by Peter Cundall and Gardening Australia (DVD). This is a combination of two videos that used to be sold separately on VHS. The "Patch from Scratch" video is really, really good if you want to learn from scratch about how to grow vegetables organically. In Patch from Scratch, Peter Cundall shows you step-by-step how to start a vegetable garden, beginning with an ordinary suburban lawn. He goes through each season (some of then broken into early and late) for 18 months, describing everything in amazing detail. There is so much information in this video you could watch it 100 times and still learn more. The only real criticism of it I can think of is that it is so densely packed with information, your brain gets saturated after 10 or 15 minutes. So don't expect to take it all in in one sitting. I would recommend watching it through all the way just for an introduction, and then watch just the section for each month that you are up to, and do what he explains in that month/season.
Click here to purchase from Australia (Fishpond) $29.99 AUD |
Movies
- The Movie made from the book of the same name, "The Education
of Little Tree" is excellent. The book is also meant to be very
good, but I have only seen the movie.
- Walkabout - Australian movie, kind
of arty and weird and sad, but worth a look.
- Rabbit Proof Fence
- Dances With Wolves
- The Emerald Forest
- The Gods Must Be Crazy, and Animals Are Beautiful People
- The Tracker - An Australian movie about an Aboriginal tracker
following another Aboriginal criminal for the white police force.
- The Hunted - Based of a true life story where a Character playing
the role of Tom Brown Jr. has to track down one of his ex-students
who has turned into a murderer.
Material on the Web
- "The 10 Bushcraft Books" is an excellent Australian guide
to wilderness living. You can view
it online here.
- Herbs are Special. Planting a garden with food potential is one of the most valuable things we can do. Isabell Shipard knows this well... with over 30 years of extensive research, knowledge and experience in growing herbs, collecting, and using herbs, spices, fruit trees, rare edibles, seed varieties, sprouts, culinary herbs and medicinal herbs, natural herbal remedies, alternative herbal medicines, natural herbal pain relief, herbal nutrition and Self-Sufficiency... making Isabell one of Australia's most knowledgable and sought after authorities on herbs.
- Tom Brown
Jr runs what is probably the world's largest and best known
school teaching survival, tracking, awareness, and wilderness living
skills. He is the author of about 15 books, all of which I highly
recommend (I haven't read the latest one which is all about his
police/law tracking cases though). His books are in two styles,
the field guides and the autobiographical/story books. The first
book is "The Tracker", which is a good place to start,
although I read the second book "The Search" first.
- Thomas J. Elpel's website, www.hollowtop.com,
contains much excellent information. I also highly recommend
his book Participating
in Nature: Thomas J. Elpel's Field Guide to Primitive Living Skills.
Some of his other books, and his "Art
of Nothing" DVDs, are at the top of my "next to get" list
of wilderness survival books.
- Ron Hood's website www.survival.com has
a lot of useful stuff. I highly recommend his Woodsmaster
videos.
- This is a great site about primitive technology: www.primitiveways.com.
- Wildwood
Survival is an excellent site with many articles and tutorials
on survival and wilderness skills and philosophy.
- The Society of
Primitive Technology (American)
- Australian survivalist website and forum www.aussurvivalist.com.
- A great site to look up plants in NSW, Australia,
is the NSW
PlantNet. The site features information about basically any and
all plants growing wild in NSW, both native and introduced. The plant
descriptions are very scientific/botanical. There are line drawings
of the plants, and range maps of where they grow, and many also have
photos. You can search on scientific/botanical or common names. Similar
databases exist for some of the other Australian states.
Survival and Nature Courses
- The Kamana Naturalist Training Program at
Wilderness Awareness School (North American) is an excellent correspondence
course teaching wilderness and native skills and awareness. The focus
is more on native awareness and on learning your local plants and
animals than on survival and living skills as such. With this course,
it would take a long time before you knew a lot of actual practical
skills—but by the time you did, your level of knowledge would
be very, very deep and broad. There are four levels to the course,
of which I have completed one.
- Cumberland
State Forest, Pennant Hills, 35 minutes drive northwest
of the centre of Sydney, has a bush tucker walk that is almost
free (I think it was about
$3
when
I
did it
a couple
of
years ago).
It
is only short, but definitely worthwhile. They also have a bush tucker
garden where you can see many bush food plants growing, with their
names
on signs next to the plants. From their website: "Cumberland has
an extensive range of programs for community groups, families and
individuals.
These
include
guided walks, slide presentations, spotlighting tours, school holiday
activities, treasure hunts, bush tucker tastings and a volunteer
bush regeneration program. Become a volunteer bush regenerator. Bookings
are necessary for all activities ph: (02) 9871 3377".
- Bundeluk, an Aboriginal artist, educator, and tour guide (Darug)
leads many bush tucker walks in the Blue Mountains and Western Sydney
area. 0410763435
- Muru
Mittigar Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Cranebrook, near Penrith,
NSW, has an Aboriginal museum and information centre. Artifacts on
display
including traditional tools, etc., and a native nursery.
- TAFE
NSW Course 2647 - Outdoor Recreation (Interpretive Guiding):
This course is a long-term course angled towards learning to be
a bushwalking guide. It includes learning the native plants,
animals, and Aboriginal history/sites/customs/practices/etc. It is
offered in the Blue Mountains and I think also at Canberra. There
may be variants of it in other states (possibly
North QLD?). Half of the class hours are spent in the field (that
is, bushwalking). You can go on to do more outdoor recreation after
this course, and some of the further courses do include more survival-like
content
although they seem to be mainly angled towards abseiling/climbing/canyoning
type activities.
Commercial Survival Courses
- High
n Wild - Bush Tucker and survival courses in the Blue Mountains.
- Adventure
Guides - survival , navigation, and tracking courses in the
Blue Mountains (scroll down to the bottom of the page).
- Australian School of Mountaineering - survival, bushcraft and navigation
courses in the Blue Mountains.
- More survival-related courses in Australia are described at AusSurvivalist.com.
As of my writing this, not all of the links on their page are working.
If you get a page not found error after clicking on a link, try removing
just the page
name
from
the
URL,
leaving
only
the domain name of the site you want to look at.
Permaculture Courses
Permaculture Design Course (PDC) Online with PermacultureVisions.com
PermacultureVisions.com is has been running since 1993. Serving students and graduates in 24 countries. Scholarships provided to people with special needs. No fixed dates to start. Individual tuition and group participation through participants mailing list. Policy of personalised, student-focused, stress free learning environment. Courses offered are an Introduction to Permaculture, the Permaculture Design Course, and a Refresher Course.
Click here to visit PermacultureVisions.com.
 Equipment
- eBladeStore is an online knife (and other equipment, like machetes and camp axes, but mainly knives) store with an absolutely massive inventory of products. Their "Brands" drop-down menu runs two levels deep, and for just TOPS Knives they have 143 different products. They have the Tom Brown Tracker Knife much cheaper than on Tom's own site. They are located in the USA but can post to most countries as long as you are careful not to order anything that is illegal in your country (such as a butterfly knife), that might be seized by customs.
- Australasian Knife Collectors
- If there was one type of modern cordage you would most want in a
survival or wilderness living situation, it would be "550 Paracord".
I used to have a link to buy it, but it stopped working so I took it off. If you know of an Australian source for it, please let me know. There are a couple of links to American suppliers of 550 Paracord in the right-hand column of this page.
- Prepare 2 Survive -
Australian outlet for a large range of survival-related items.
Spiritual and Psychology
- Theun Mares' website is www.toltec-foundation.org. His books can
be purchased in two forms. The old style is recently out of print,
but some of them can still be found new at many bookshops and at Amazon.com
 . The new style
is much more expensive, due mainly to the archival-quality of the
paper and binding, and can be purchased from his website.
This book is firstly for the thinkers of the world
who have seen for themselves that humanity cannot continue indefinitely
on its present course, and that a drastic change in human attitudes
and thinking is necessary if world prosperity is to be ensured.
Theun
Mares, Return of the Warriors.
Peak Oil and Transition Preparation
- Transition Sydney
- Transition Blue Mountains
- An excellent Australian site on Peak Oil, Resilience, Population Overshoot, Neotribalism, Food System Collapse, Global Economic Meltdown & Societal Instability is Michael Pinilla's site AlienWorld.
- For peak oil, one of the most convincing pieces of media that I have come
across is Matt Savinar's first interview on "Feet
to the Fire". The interview is the third segment in
this stream, it begins at 1 hour, 09 minutes, and about 50 seconds from
the start of the stream. It plays for about 40 minutes, plus an extra
20 minute "bonus" segment that was not part of the original
radio broadcast. This interview is rather confronting.
- Matt's second interview on Feet to the Fire is available here.
- Matt Savinar's website, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net — this
is an excellent site, describing the coming oil crisis in a clear, easy
to understand way. It is rather confronting, though.
- An extremely good introductory Australian peak oil site is www.eclipsenow.org.
- An excellent
presentation from the Australian ABC show Four Corners about peak
oil.
- I highly recommend the DVD "The
End of Suburbia". In Australia it is available from the Ebono
Institute. This is probably the best video presentation on peak
oil that I have seen. Excellent to show to groups of people (or to yourself)
as an introduction to the subject.
- There is a new DVD coming out soon called Escape
From Suburbia that looks like it will be extremely good.
- A movie has been made about Cuba's response
to their oil crisis in the early 1990s, that is meant to be extremely
good—and also very positive, optimistic, and inspiring (unlike much
of the other peak oil material).
- A great video about peak oil, 13 minutes, from ABC
TV's Catalyst programme. Note that the severely optimistic comments
made by ExxonMobil in this video strongly contradict other statements
by this company, for example those given here.
- Australian
Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas — a new association,
a division of the global ASPO (www.peakoil.net).
- Do a Google search on "peak
oil".
Peak Oil Groups
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