The American survival literature has a familiar geography. When the grid fails, supply chains break and social order begins to fray, the advice is to head for the mountains, the forests, the farming country or some lightly populated state blessed with rivers, rainfall and enough good soil to feed the people who remain. The recent ZeroHedge exercise (link below, well worth reading), identifying five American places to be when society begins to collapse, follows that tradition. It is an interesting thought experiment, but Australia requires a very different map.
Australia is an extraordinarily dry and climatically variable continent. Most of its population lives in a thin coastal arc, while much of the enormous interior that looks reassuringly empty on a map is empty for very good reasons. There is no Australian equivalent of simply disappearing into a vast temperate American heartland containing plentiful rainfall, forests, rivers and farmland. Drive far enough inland from an Australian capital city and remoteness ceases to be protection; it becomes another problem. That changes the fundamental question. The Australian looking for refuge from a serious breakdown should not begin by asking how far he can get from the city. He should ask what this particular piece of land can provide when the systems connecting it to modern civilisation stop working. The answer begins with water, but it does not end there.
Australia's cities are remarkable engineering achievements partly because enormous populations have been concentrated in environments that could never sustain them in their present form without modern infrastructure. Dams, reservoirs, pipelines, pumps, treatment plants, groundwater systems and, increasingly in some cities, desalination, make urban life possible. Electricity keeps much of that machinery working, while trucks and distribution centres keep supermarkets stocked. Turn those systems off for an afternoon and Australians complain. Turn them off for a week and governments confront an emergency. Turn them off for months and the nature of the country reasserts itself.
The first mistake in thinking about such a scenario is to assume that Australia would simply run out of food. Australia is a major agricultural producer and exporter; the continent produces far more food than its supermarket shelves might suggest. The problem in a genuine systems collapse would be converting agricultural capacity into food available to the population. A wheat field is not a loaf of bread. Modern agriculture requires diesel, machinery, replacement parts, fertiliser, electricity, processing, refrigeration, finance and transport. Grain must be harvested, stored, milled and distributed. Livestock must be processed. Milk must be refrigerated. Fruit and vegetables have to reach consumers before they rot. A country can therefore possess enormous agricultural resources while its cities go hungry. That distinction is crucial to understanding the Australian problem. The danger is not necessarily absolute scarcity. It is the collapse of the immense technological system that converts land, water and energy into reliable food for almost 28 million people.
Water is even less forgiving. A household can survive a surprising amount of inconvenience without electricity. It cannot survive very long without water. Australian cities therefore become particularly vulnerable when the thought experiment moves beyond ordinary blackouts towards prolonged infrastructure failure. The taps do not necessarily stop immediately. Reservoirs contain water and emergency systems exist. Governments would obviously prioritise water infrastructure above almost everything else. But in the extreme scenario being considered here, eventually pumps require power, treatment requires chemicals and electricity, pipes require maintenance and reservoirs require functioning distribution systems. A desalination plant is an impressive piece of infrastructure when the grid works. Without reliable energy it is a very expensive building beside the sea.
This is why Australia's empty interior is mostly a false refuge. The Outback offers distance from urban disorder, but distance from people is of limited value when it is accompanied by distance from dependable water and food. A remote property dependent upon an electrically pumped bore may actually be more vulnerable than a much less isolated farm with tanks, dams, rainfall and gravity-fed water. The Australian survival map therefore looks almost upside down. Remoteness comes after water.
The obvious candidates begin in the wetter parts of the eastern seaboard and Great Dividing Range. Northern New South Wales, parts of southeast Queensland, the New England Tablelands and other elevated agricultural districts combine rainfall, productive land and established farming communities. Farther north, the Atherton Tablelands possess their own unusual combination of elevation, rainfall and agriculture. These places have something the desert cannot provide: functioning ecological systems capable of supporting agriculture without importing the water itself. But their great strength creates their great vulnerability. They are not secret. Millions of people live in Brisbane, Sydney and the surrounding urban corridors. In a prolonged breakdown, productive districts within reach of major cities would become obvious destinations. The same road that normally carries agricultural produce towards the city could carry desperate people in the opposite direction.
This is where the American "bug-out" fantasy becomes particularly questionable in Australia. A city of several million people cannot evacuate itself into surrounding farmland. There are not millions of vacant farmhouses waiting for occupants. Rural communities have finite water, finite food, finite medical resources and finite carrying capacity. Agricultural land already belongs to somebody and is already being used. Nor does an accountant become a subsistence farmer because his supermarket has closed. The knowledge required to produce food reliably is itself a resource.
Tasmania therefore emerges as perhaps the most interesting Australian case. It has substantial rainfall, extensive freshwater resources, productive agricultural country, hydroelectric generation and a comparatively small population. Bass Strait also provides something unavailable to mainland agricultural districts: a natural barrier between the island and the largest concentrations of Australia's population. In a severe national breakdown, that isolation could become enormously valuable. It could also become enormously dangerous. Tasmania is not an autarkic civilisation floating in the Southern Ocean. It depends upon mainland and international supply chains for many manufactured goods, fuels, medicines, machinery and specialised components. If regular Bass Strait transport failed, the island would become much harder for outsiders to reach while simultaneously losing access to things Tasmanians themselves require. Isolation cuts both ways.
The same applies elsewhere. Southwestern Western Australia has productive agricultural country and a Mediterranean climate, but rainfall variability and dependence upon modern infrastructure remain serious considerations. Southern Victoria contains some exceptionally productive and well-watered country, but proximity to Melbourne becomes a disadvantage in the most extreme scenario. Parts of coastal and higher-rainfall South Australia are vastly more resilient than the state's dry reputation suggests, but Adelaide itself contains a large population dependent upon complex water and food systems. This illustrates why state boundaries are almost meaningless for the exercise. A property in the Adelaide Hills with substantial rainwater storage, a reliable dam or creek, productive soil, independent energy and established gardens may be vastly more resilient than a supposedly remote property hundreds of kilometres farther inland. The same principle applies throughout Australia. The meaningful unit is not the state. It is the property and the community surrounding it.
Does water fall there reliably enough to capture? How much can be stored? Is there surface water? Is groundwater available, and if so can it be accessed without depending entirely upon complex electrical equipment? Can food actually be grown? Are there livestock? Is there timber? What happens during drought? How much energy can be produced locally? Can essential equipment be repaired? Are there neighbours with useful skills? Those questions reveal something that survival fantasies often overlook. Technology matters, but skills matter almost as much. A shed full of equipment becomes progressively less useful if nobody can repair it. A paddock is not automatically a farm. Seeds do not become crops merely because somebody owns them. Chickens become dinner surprisingly quickly if nobody understands how to maintain a breeding flock.
Modern civilisation has allowed extraordinary specialisation because individuals no longer need to know how most of the things keeping them alive actually work. The city worker earns money performing one specialised task and exchanges that money for food, electricity, water, medicine, clothing, transport and shelter produced by thousands of strangers. Remove the exchange system and suddenly forgotten competencies become valuable again. The farmer, mechanic, electrician, nurse, carpenter and person who knows how to preserve food may become considerably more useful than someone whose expertise depends entirely upon a functioning corporate information system.
Energy therefore belongs beside water in any serious Australian analysis. Solar panels are valuable, but panels alone do not constitute an independent electrical system. Batteries eventually fail. Inverters fail. Electronics require replacement components. Diesel generators require fuel. Even apparently primitive technologies require knowledge and maintenance. Hydroelectricity gives Tasmania an unusual advantage here, while smaller-scale solar, wood and other locally manageable energy sources could matter greatly elsewhere.
Yet the greatest mistake would be imagining the problem entirely at the level of individual households. Human beings survive through communities. The romantic survivalist retreat containing one family, a vegetable garden and enough canned food to outlast civilisation, makes good television. Historically, durable human societies have depended upon cooperation and division of labour. Someone grows grain. Someone repairs machinery. Someone treats injuries. Someone manages livestock. Someone builds things. Someone knows what to do when the pump fails. That makes a functioning rural town surrounded by productive agricultural land potentially more resilient than an isolated cabin occupied by one extremely well-equipped individual.
It also introduces the darkest element of the Australian collapse thought experiment: what happens to the cities? Australia is among the world's most urbanised societies. Sydney and Melbourne each contain populations measured in millions, with Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide adding millions more. These populations survive because immense quantities of food, water, fuel and other necessities arrive continuously through systems almost nobody notices while they are working. Supermarkets themselves hold relatively little of the food required to sustain a city for an extended period. The real pantry is moving. It consists of warehouses, trucks, trains, ships, refrigeration systems, farms, processors and computerised logistics networks. Stop the movement and the shelves reveal how little food was actually in the building.
In an ordinary disaster, government restores the system. Trucks return. Electricity comes back. Emergency water is distributed. Police maintain order. That is why Australians have survived floods, fires, cyclones and blackouts without descending into some Mad Max fantasy. The ZeroHedge scenario asks us to imagine something categorically worse: what if restoration does not occur? Then geography begins to matter brutally. Urban populations would naturally move towards places believed to possess food and water. Yet those places would be incapable of absorbing millions of additional people. Productive rural communities might possess resources, but those resources would rapidly disappear if population suddenly multiplied. The refugee problem could consequently become more important than simple remoteness. A fertile district two hours from a metropolis might initially appear ideal and later become dangerously exposed. A less productive district farther away might possess fewer resources but face less population pressure.
There is no perfect answer because every advantage creates another vulnerability. That is why Australia's real survival geography cannot be reduced to a list of five locations. The best place is not necessarily Tasmania, the New England Tablelands, the Adelaide Hills or southwestern Western Australia. The best place is somewhere possessing a particular combination of attributes: dependable locally accessible water, productive land, manageable population density, locally sustainable energy, useful infrastructure, distance from major population concentrations and, perhaps most importantly, a functioning community containing practical skills. Water remains first because without it everything else becomes irrelevant. But water buys time rather than guaranteeing survival. Food, energy, knowledge and cooperation determine what can be done with that time.
There is also an important reason not to become carried away with the apocalypse. "Collapse" covers radically different events. A global financial depression is not a national grid failure. A major cyberattack is not a nuclear war. The breakdown of international shipping is not the disappearance of Australian government. Even a global catastrophe could leave Australia comparatively well placed because it is geographically isolated, resource-rich, agriculturally productive and sparsely populated relative to its enormous land area. The nightmare begins when several systems fail together. Electricity fails, taking communications and pumping with it. Fuel distribution breaks down, crippling agriculture and transport. Supply chains stop. Water treatment becomes unreliable. Government loses the capacity to restore services quickly. Then each failure magnifies the next. But it is improbable.
That scenario is far more frightening than simply asking which Australian town is furthest from trouble. It also provides the real lesson of the American collapse discussion. Australia's sanctuary is not necessarily the place furthest from civilisation. It is the place where civilisation's essential functions can still be reproduced locally. That may be a Tasmanian farming community with rainfall and hydroelectricity. It may be a productive tablelands district. It may be a small town surrounded by farms. It may even be a modest property relatively close to a capital city if it possesses reliable water, food-producing capacity, independent power and neighbours who know how to make things work. Conversely, an isolated retreat in spectacular country may become a death trap if its survival depends upon one electric bore pump and a truck delivering diesel from 300 kilometres away.
Australia has always punished people who confuse empty country with habitable country. That would become brutally apparent in a genuine collapse. The American survivalist can dream about escaping civilisation. The Australian needs to ask a harder question: how much civilisation can we reproduce for ourselves when the larger system stops supplying it? The answer begins with the oldest Australian problem of all. Water. But after the water comes land, food, energy, skills and other people. In the end, those may constitute the real Australian survival map.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/5-places-america-you-want-be-when-society-begins-collapse