IMPORTANT: This web page
has moved to
Resources
New page added 11 August 2006: Family and Community
Farming.
New page added 24 May 2006: Australian Field
Guides and Other Books.
Books
Australian Field Guides and Other Books
What It Is To Be Human, by Robert Wolff.
Ancient Futures - Learning From Ladakh, by Helena Norberg-Hodge.
Many more book links and other links coming soon.
An advertisement appears below—I get a small percentage of revenue when purchases (of anything) are made from Amazon.com via this website.
Movies, Video, DVD, and Audio
The Seeing Through Native Eyes audio series by Jon Young is part of the Kamana course, but is also designed to be used on its own (that is, it's also an excellent resource for people who are not doing the Kamana course). I highly recommend this!
You can buy the "Bush Tucker Man" series by Les Hiddins from the ABC shop. Many video shops also have some of these, they are definitely worth a look.
Videos by John & Geri McPherson, authors of "Naked
into the wilderness".
www.grannysstore.com/Wilderness_Survival/mcpherson.htm#videos.
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.
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.
Courses
The Kamana 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 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.
Equipment
Jensen Elite Blades - Peter Jensen is one of Australia's most respected custom knife makers, specialising in survival and combat knives.
If there was one type of modern cordage you would most want in a survival or wilderness living situation, it would be "550 Paracord". In Australia, you can buy it here from SORD Australia.
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
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
For peak oil, the single most convincing piece 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
Blue Mountains Peak Oil Survival Group
Sydney Peak Oil is an excellent website, with a bulletin board where you can meet people interested in peak oil, its ramifications, and possible solutions.
World Directory of Peak Oil Groups