The plan

Two adults, two cats, a rented house in Runcorn. Most emergencies are boring and short. A storm, a grid failure, a fortnight of empty shelves. You do not need a bunker. You need thirty days of supplies, a way to make water safe, and the discipline not to panic. The people who die in disruptions are rarely killed by the disruption. They are killed by the third day of their own bad decisions.

The three horizons

Disruption (days to months). The lights flicker, shops empty, order holds but supply does not. Survivable at home if you planned. This is the one that actually happens, so it gets most of the effort.
Breakdown (one to two years). Services limp or stop. Stock is thin and dear, power is intermittent. Habits, not hoards, keep you fed: growing, fixing, preserving, trading.
Long collapse (indefinite). Nobody survives this alone. Community, food production, sanitation and written knowledge are what matter. The lone wolf is a story people tell themselves.

The 72 hour reality

A supermarket holds two to three days of stock and relies on nightly restocking. Cut the restock and the maths is done by Thursday. Bottled water clears first, then bread and milk, then anything tinned. The single biggest early advantage is realising what is happening a day before the neighbours do. Plan to already have what you need before the queue forms.

Disruption: the first thirty days

Fill every container with water while it still runs. Charge everything. Check on Will and the cats. Do not broadcast what you have. Then sit down and read the situation before you spend a cent. The full shopping list lives in Stores.

Breakdown: one to two years of degraded normal

A month of stores gets you through a shock. A year or two is a different problem: you are resupplying, not running down what you bought.

Rotate and resupply. Cook from your stores now so it is a habit before you need it. Buy the boring staples deep and the treats shallow.
Grow something. Renting means pots and quick wins: leafy greens, herbs, chillies, spring onions, cherry tomatoes. Save seed. A few pots will not feed you but they lift morale and stretch what you have.
A renewable protein line. Lentils and besan you can restock, eggs if a neighbour keeps chooks, fish from Bulimba Creek (see Food), and barter for the rest.
The barter economy forms. Your stored consumables and skills become worth more than cash. Being useful and reliable is the asset that compounds.

Long collapse: the honest version

Over an open ended timeline, the thing that keeps you alive is other people, a working local economy, sanitation, and knowledge that outlasts any single supply.

Community. Shared labour, shared risk, shared defence, shared care of the sick. A group of trusted people beats any amount of gear.
Food production. Not stores, production. Soil, seed, water, and the knowledge to turn them into calories year after year.
Sanitation and disease control. Historically this kills more than violence ever does. Clean water, waste kept away from food and water, wound care, isolation of the sick.
Knowledge preservation. Written down, on paper, shared. This guide is a start. Print it.

Routine, purpose and connection are not luxuries over the long haul, they are survival infrastructure. Keep a rhythm. Give everyone a job. Mark time. Grieve properly.

If it ever comes to the road: travel light, travel early, travel known ground. Move between known water sources, not between destinations. Direction and refuges live in Out there.

When it goes sideways: the basics

The rule of threes

Three minutes without air. Three hours without shelter in harsh conditions. Three days without water. Three weeks without food. Note that food, the thing everyone stockpiles first, is the thing that kills you last. The human body has clear priorities. Preppers frequently do not.

Order of operations

Stop. Assess. Do not act on adrenaline.
Immediate danger first (fire, flood, structural, heat).
Temperature and shelter.
Water, then a way to clean it.
Then food, then everything else.

The cheapest survival tool

Calm. It weighs nothing, costs nothing, and is permanently out of stock when you need it most, which is why you stockpile it now. Panic burns energy, clouds judgement and makes people do expensive, dangerous things. The person who sits down and thinks for two minutes outlives the person who runs. Practise being that person while it is still just a queue at Woolworths.

Fire, cooking, sanitation

A camp stove and gas is the easiest off grid cooking; learn one backup. Never run any fuel burner indoors, carbon monoxide gives no warning. Soap or ash and water before touching food, waste in a dug hole away from water. This one habit prevents more death than any weapon.

Skills and currency

Making water safe. The single most useful skill there is.
First aid and wound care. You will be the paramedic.
Preserving food. Drying, fermenting, salting, so a glut does not rot.
Repair and making do. Sewing, patching, basic mechanical and electrical. Will's territory, expand it.
Growing from seed, and saving seed.
Cooking well from plain stores. Morale is a survival skill and good food is how you defend it.

Forget gold. Nobody in the history of any disaster has ever eaten an ingot. The currency is consumables people need and cannot make: medicines, batteries, hygiene items, seeds, fuel, salt, coffee, alcohol, clean water, and above all skills and labour. Coffee deserves special mention. In week three, the person holding coffee sets the exchange rate.

Security, the realistic threat model

The marauding gang is the least of your problems. The things most likely to hurt you, in order: accidents, infection, dehydration, heat, fire and bad water. Fix those first.

Do not advertise what you have. Grey, quiet, unremarkable is safety. Cook smells travel, lights are visible, and a generator announces your address to every hungry person within two suburbs. Manage all three.
Your actual defences: not looking worth robbing, a group that looks after each other, good doors and a habit of locking them, situational awareness, and the discipline to de escalate. A fight you win still costs injuries you cannot treat.
Trust is built slowly and in advance. The network (see Out there) is your security, far more than any lock.

The prepper who plans mostly for shootouts has usually not thought hard enough about diarrhoea. Boring kills more people than dramatic ever does.

Realistic framing for two people

You cannot grow all your food, treat every injury, defend a perimeter, and stay sane, all at once, alone. That is not a gap in the plan, it is the reason the plan is a network. The most valuable thing you own is being someone a group wants: useful, steady, fair, and good to have around when things are grim.

Now

The picture as of mid 2026. This is the one section built to go stale, because it describes a moving situation, not a fixed skill. Read it as the weather, not the climate, and update it when the world does.

The Strait of Hormuz

What is happening

Since late February 2026 a United States and Israeli air war against Iran has closed most traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has mined the strait and its Revolutionary Guard has boarded and attacked merchant ships. Roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and a fifth of its liquefied gas normally pass through that one channel. Daily transits have fallen from around 138 to a handful. This is not a distant news story. It is the tap that fills your petrol station.

Fuel

Australia imports about 90% of its liquid fuel and refines almost none of it. Petrol has run around $1.90 to $2.20 a litre and diesel $2.70 to $3.00, well above the pre crisis $1.60 and $1.80. National reserves sit near 44 days of petrol and 33 of diesel. Diesel is the one that matters most. It moves the trucks that move the food.

Fertiliser, the quiet one

Australia imports about 95% of its urea and roughly two thirds of that comes from the Gulf. Urea has doubled, from around $850 a tonne to over $1,400, with cargo stranded and producers walking away from contracts. The only domestic urea plant closed in 2022 and its replacement is not due until 2027. No fertiliser means smaller harvests next season, which means dearer food a year after the headlines fade.

Fuel is the crisis you see at the bowser. Fertiliser is the crisis you see at the checkout twelve months later, and never connect to the same cause. The lesson is the one this whole guide is built on: grow something, and do not depend on a supply chain that runs through one narrow strait on the other side of the world.

The next year or two

This is the breakdown horizon arriving early and in slow motion, not with a bang. Expect fuel that is dear and occasionally rationed, food prices that climb in steps and do not come back down, and shortages that appear, ease, and reappear as the strait opens and closes. None of it is the end of the world. All of it is the reason to have thirty days of stores, a way to make water safe, and a garden already started.

The climate, near term

A strong El Niño is here

The Bureau of Meteorology declared El Niño in June 2026 and the forecasts favour a strong, possibly record event peaking over the 2026 to 2027 summer. For south east Queensland that means the opposite of the wet La Niña years just gone. Expect a hot, dry summer, low rainfall, more heatwaves, and serious bushfire and grassfire danger inland and on the fringes. This corner of the state has already been drier than average since the start of the year.

Water gets tighter. Rain, your main resupply (see Water), becomes less reliable exactly when you need it most. Store more, waste less, treat every source.
Heat becomes the daily threat. A hot summer with an unreliable grid is the single most dangerous scenario for the two of you. The heat plan in Health is not optional reading this year.
Fire enters the picture. Not in Runcorn itself, but in the ranges and fringes you might move toward, and the smoke reaches the city.

One honest caveat: a strong El Niño does not reliably mean a worse one. Some of Australia's worst fire and drought years came on weak events. Treat the strength as a warning, not a measurement.

Longer term

El Niño events burn out. This one will most likely break down through 2027 toward neutral, and the pendulum often swings back to La Niña after that. For south east Queensland that flips the threat: from drought and fire back toward heavy rain and flooding, the 1974 and 2011 and 2022 pattern. Do not build a plan that only survives a dry world. The river floods and the plain bakes, and this corner of the country does both within a few years of each other. Plan for the swing, not the snapshot.

Stores

The thirty day floor for two adults. A floor, not a target. Rotate everything and eat it normally. A stockpile you do not eat from is not a stockpile. It is a museum of expiry dates.

Food, 30 days, 2 adults, rough energy
Store	Qty for 30 days	Approx energy	Notes
White rice	6 kg	~21,600 kcal	Base carbohydrate, cheap, keeps for years
Atta (wholemeal)	5 kg	~17,000 kcal	Roti and chapati, no oven needed
Besan (Grewal)	3 kg	~11,000 kcal	Protein, Australian supply chain, versatile
Rolled oats	3 kg	~11,300 kcal	Breakfast, fibre, eats cold if it must
Red lentils	3 kg	~10,000 kcal	Protein and iron, cooks in twenty minutes
Ghee (Cook tins)	2 kg	~16,000 kcal	Fat is calorie dense. Tins beat the bucket for heat and freshness
MTR Minute Meals	20 pouches	~7,000 kcal	Hot food with zero fuel. Priority buy, also morale
Tinned fish and beans	15 tins	~6,000 kcal	Protein you can eat straight from the tin
Sugar and honey	1 kg	~4,000 kcal	Energy, preserving, tea, morale
Milk powder	1 kg	~5,000 kcal	Calcium, calories, and the difference between tea and sadness
Total		~115,000 kcal	Roughly 1,900 kcal per person per day. Add treats and spices, they matter more than you think

Water, litres per person per day
Use case	Litres p/p/day	2 adults, 30 days
Drinking, bare survival	2 L	120 L
Drinking and cooking (realistic)	4 L	240 L
Plus basic hygiene	6 L	360 L
Comfortable (washing rationed)	10 L	600 L

Renting with limited space means you will not store 600 litres, and any plan that requires you to is a plan for a different house. Store what you can, rotate bottles, and treat your ability to purify (see Water) as the real supply. Brisbane rain is your resupply. It is the one delivery service that keeps operating.

Going deeper: three months for two

The thirty day floor gets you through a shock. If you want a real buffer, this is the buy once, eat down, replace as you go list: cheap, dense, boring staples that keep for years and cover roughly three months of eating for the two of you, with margin. Buy it in one big shop, then live off it and top it back up.

Three month deep pantry, 2 adults, about 2,000 kcal each a day
Store	Buy	Approx energy	Why
White rice	20 kg	~72,000 kcal	The base. Cheap, stores for years, cooks on anything
Plain flour and atta	15 kg	~51,000 kcal	Bread, roti, thickening, no oven needed
Rolled oats	10 kg	~38,000 kcal	Breakfast, fibre, eats cold if it must
Pasta	5 kg	~17,500 kcal	Fast, filling, and a change from rice
Red lentils	8 kg	~27,000 kcal	Protein and iron, cooks in twenty minutes
Chickpeas and besan	6 kg	~21,600 kcal	Protein, curries, flour, Australian supply
Dried beans, mixed	5 kg	~17,000 kcal	Protein, stores for years, soak and boil
Cooking oil	8 L	~72,000 kcal	The densest calorie you can buy. Fat is survival
Ghee	3 kg	~27,000 kcal	Keeps without a fridge, better in the heat than butter
Sugar	4 kg	~16,000 kcal	Energy, preserving, tea, morale
Honey	1 kg	~3,000 kcal	Keeps almost forever, soothes throats, treats wounds
Milk powder	4 kg	~20,000 kcal	Calcium and calories, makes everything nicer
Peanut butter	3 kg	~17,700 kcal	Fat and protein, keeps, eaten straight from the jar
Tinned fish and meat	30 tins	~15,000 kcal	Protein you can eat cold from the tin
Tinned beans, veg, tomatoes	20 tins	~6,000 kcal	Variety and a few greens in a beige diet
Salt	1 kg	none	Essential, preserving, electrolytes, and good barter
Tea, coffee, spices	as you like	trace	Morale is a calorie you cannot count. Buy plenty
Total		~420,000 kcal	Roughly three months for two, with a little to spare

Charlie and Pishi, three months

Dry food, about 12 kg for the pair. A cat needs roughly 200 calories a day, which is about 60 grams of dry food. Two cats over three months adds up faster than you think.
Wet tins, 40 or so. Heavy, and worth it. The water content earns its place when water is tight.
Their water, stored with yours. They dehydrate fast.
Any regular medications, a buffer of those too.

They will not ration themselves. That is your job.

How to actually live on this

A pile of sacks is not a meal plan. The easiest way to feed yourselves off staples is the way most of the world already does it.

Rice and lentils are the engine. Together they make a complete protein and cost almost nothing. Half the planet lives on some version of dal and rice for good reason. Learn to cook it well and it never gets boring, because you keep changing the spice, not the base.
Cheapest calories, in order: oil, flour, rice, sugar, oats, dried legumes. Tinned meat is the dearest way to buy a calorie, so treat it as a topping, not a base.
A day that works: oats for breakfast, rice and dal for lunch and dinner, a spoon of oil stirred through everything for calories, milk powder in the tea, something sweet at night so morale does not starve before you do.
Eat the pile now. Cook from your stores this month so replacing what you use is a habit, nothing dies on the shelf, and you already know the recipes before you need them.

The gap in a sack of rice

Staples keep you alive, not healthy. A diet of only rice and flour runs short on vitamins within weeks, vitamin C and vitamin A and the B group first, and your body starts telling you about it. This is exactly what the garden and foraging are for: greens and something fresh, every day. Cheap insurance to bridge the gap is a big tub of multivitamins and a jar of vitamin C tablets. They cost little, keep for years, and go on the shelf with the food, not after it. An all rice diet keeps you alive right up until the day it does not.

Also on the shelf

Power and light: torches, a decent power bank, spare batteries, a way to charge phones off the car
Cooking off grid: a gas camp stove and spare canisters. Never run it indoors. Carbon monoxide has no smell, no colour, and no interest in your plans
Cash in small notes. Card networks go down with the power
Documents: copies of IDs, insurance, scripts, the cats' records, somewhere waterproof
The med kit and the wellness stores (Health & cats)

Numbers and channels, write these on paper
Who	Number / channel	When
Emergency	000	Life in danger, fire, serious injury
SES	132 500	Storm and flood damage, roof, trees, sandbags
13 HEALTH	13 43 25 84	Nurse advice when a GP is out of reach
Poisons Info	13 11 26	Anything swallowed that should not have been
Energex	13 62 62	Power outages and fallen lines, southside
ABC Radio Brisbane	612 AM	The official emergency broadcaster. A battery or wind up radio makes this work with no grid
Brisbane disaster dashboard	disaster.brisbane.qld.gov.au	Road closures and alerts, while internet holds
BOM warnings	bom.gov.au/qld	Storms, floods, heatwaves, before they arrive

Phones die and networks jam. This table is only useful if it also exists on paper, stuck to the fridge and folded into the go bag.

The go bag, if you have to walk out the door in five minutes

Water bottles and purification tablets
Documents folder (copies), cash in small notes
Meds for both of you, a small first aid kit
Torch, power bank, battery radio, spare batteries
Change of clothes, hats, sturdy shoes already by the door
Cat carriers, a day of their food, their records and photos
This guide, printed

Water

Brisbane has water everywhere and almost none of it is safe to drink as found. Finding it is easy. Making it safe is the entire job.

The one rule

Treat every source. Clear it, filter it, then boil or chemically treat. Clear water is not clean water: the pathogens that flatten you are invisible, and the subtropical warmth breeds them fast. Store treated water covered and away from light.

Making it safe

Boiling, the gold standard

A rolling boil for one full minute, three if unsure of the source. Kills everything living that can hurt you. It does not remove chemicals, so pick the cleanest source you can first.

Chemical treatment

Unscented household bleach: roughly two drops per litre of clear water, four if cloudy, wait thirty minutes. It should smell faintly of chlorine. Purification tablets are cleaner and worth stocking.

Filtering

Filter first to clear the grit, then treat. Cloth removes debris, a proper hollow fibre filter removes the bugs. Cloth alone does not make water safe, it just makes treatment work better.

SODIS, when you have nothing

Clear PET bottle, filled with clear water, laid in full Brisbane sun for six hours. UV does real work. It is the only survival technique in this guide that consists entirely of putting a bottle on the ground and walking away, and it still outperforms optimism.

Close to home

Rain is your best source and Brisbane gives you plenty. A tarp, a clean sheet, any large surface funnelling into a clean container catches the cleanest water available. Off a roof, skip the dirty first flush. Creeks like Bulimba carry urban runoff, never drink them untreated. The lower Brisbane River is tidal and brackish, do not bother, salt water only hurts you. Still or stagnant water is a last resort and always needs full treatment.

The wider region

Rainwater tanks Domestic roof capture, everywhere outside the city centreBest first▶

NotesThe quiet answer. Half the houses outside the city centre have a tank, most feeding off a clean-ish roof. First flush diverters, sealed lids, gravity feed. The best raw water quality you will find, and it comes pre collected. TreatmentCleaner than surface water but still treat if the source is unknown. Dead possums in tanks are a Queensland tradition. Boil if in any doubt.

Farm dams Roughly 1,700 across the region, Lockyer Valley and Scenic Rim especiallySecond▶

NotesDispersed, low profile, unguarded, unmapped in any way that matters. Individually small; collectively the most survivable water strategy in SEQ. Nobody fights over a dam they do not know exists. TreatmentLivestock and runoff contamination guaranteed. Filter and boil without exception. Stagnant green water: move on.

Lake Baroon Baroon Pocket Dam, Obi Obi Creek, near MalenyHinterland▶

NotesHinterland storage in high rainfall country, minutes from Maleny and from Green Harvest (see Out there). Water and seed within the same short walk is a rare coincidence worth building a plan around. TreatmentFilter and boil. Cleaner catchment than the lowland rivers, still not safe raw.

Lake Wivenhoe Wivenhoe Dam, Brisbane River, ~80km NWHinterland▶

NotesThe region's principal storage, over 1.1 million megalitres behind a 2.3km wall. It exists because of the 1974 flood and holds back the next one. With no treatment plants running it is simply a very large body of untreated open water. TreatmentFilter, then boil (rolling, one minute) or chemically treat every litre. Surface water carries protozoa the tap did not.

Lake Somerset Somerset Dam, Stanley River, ~100km NHinterland▶

NotesFeeds Wivenhoe; the two run as one system. Cooler, deeper hinterland water. Less obvious, less contested, which in a breakdown is the entire point of it. TreatmentTreat as Wivenhoe. Cooler water slows spoilage but changes nothing about pathogens.

The river network Brisbane, Bremer, Logan, Stanley, MaryLast resort▶

NotesReliable flow, reliably filthy. The Brisbane and Bremer run through everything upstream you would rather not think about. Water is easy to find here; clean water is the whole job. TreatmentNever drink untreated. Sediment filter first (cloth, sand, charcoal), then boil or chemically treat. Downstream of any settlement, double your caution.

Food

Foraging bridges the gap between a failed pantry and a working garden. It will not, on its own, keep you alive. Treat it as supplement and morale, not strategy. The bush does not care whether you starve politely.

The one rule that keeps you alive

Never eat anything you have not positively identified, and never eat anything with milky sap unless you are certain what it is. When in doubt, go without. A wrong guess with no hospital is not a mistake you get to learn from. Learn identification from a real guide, in daylight, before you are hungry. Hunger is the worst possible teacher.

The Brisbane Big Eight, edible weeds

These grow in southside lawns, gutters and vacant lots.

Eight reliable edibles, SE Queensland
Weed	Eat	Notes
Cobbler's pegs (Bidens pilosa)	Young leaves and tips	Everywhere. Cook the older leaves. The seeds are the sticky burrs on your socks
Flatweed / false dandelion (Hypochaeris)	Leaves, roots	The yellow flower in every Brisbane lawn. Bitter raw, better cooked
Purslane (Portulaca oleracea)	Leaves and stems	Succulent, lemony, high in omega 3. See the lookalike warning below
Chickweed (Stellaria media)	Whole plant	Mild, cool season. A single line of hairs runs down the stem
Sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus)	Young leaves	Common, mild, softens with cooking. Older plants get tough and bitter
Warrigal greens (Tetragonia)	Leaves, blanched	Native spinach. Must be blanched to shed oxalates, do not eat raw in quantity
Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus)	Leaves and flowers	Garden escapee, peppery like rocket, easy to spot
Amaranth / pigweed (Amaranthus)	Leaves, and seeds	Cook the leaves. The seed heads are a genuine grain if you are patient

Dangerous lookalikes

Purslane vs spurge

The important one. Prostrate spurge grows in the same spots and looks similar low down, but it has thin milky sap and is toxic. Purslane has thick, smooth, waterlogged succulent stems and no milky sap. Snap a stem. Milky sap means put it down.

The carrot family

Avoid anything that looks like wild carrot, parsley or fennel with feathery leaves and umbrella flower heads, unless you are an expert. Hemlock lives in this family and it kills. Not worth the risk.

Milky sap, generally

A lot of Brisbane's toxic plants leak white sap when cut: some spurges, oleander, frangipani, milkweeds. None of the Big Eight do. Sap test everything low growing before it goes near your mouth.

Ornamentals that kill

Oleander, angel's trumpet (Brugmansia) and cape tulip are common in Brisbane gardens and all are seriously poisonous. Pretty is not safe. Stick to the list you know.

Bush foods of the wider region

The SEQ hinterland is one of the richest bush food regions on the continent, the natural home of the macadamia and the bunya. Green means edible, coral means do not eat.

Macadamia Macadamia integrifolia / tetraphyllaEdible▶

WhereNative to the SEQ hinterland. Wild and orchard trees through the Sunshine Coast hinterland, the ranges behind the Gold Coast, and Bauple, the mountain that gave the nut its old settler name. SeasonAutumn to winter. Nuts drop; you gather. UseThe densest calorie source you will forage in this region: roughly 70% fat, keeps for months in shell. The shell is the problem, engineered by evolution to defeat you. A vice, a hammer and a flat rock, or a length of steel pipe all work. Patience works better. CautionNone toxic. The only danger is your own teeth. Do not.

Bunya nut Araucaria bidwilliiEdible▶

WhereThe Bunya Mountains, north west of the Darling Downs, roughly three hours out. Scattered planted specimens survive across older SEQ properties and parks. SeasonMasts heavily every two to three years, a proper glut every seven or so. A good bunya year is a genuine event; plan the calendar around it. UseCones weigh up to 18kg and hold roughly 50 to 100 large starchy kernels. Boil or roast, raw they are indigestible. Historically the trigger for the largest gatherings on the continent, tribes travelling hundreds of kilometres to the Bon-yi feasts. Stores well as flour once dried. CautionThe falling cones can kill you. This is not a joke and it is not rare. Do not camp, sleep or stand under a fruiting bunya. The tree survived the dinosaurs; it will survive you.

Finger lime Citrus australasicaEdible▶

WhereRainforest understory and margins, SEQ and the Northern Rivers. Thorny, you will feel it before you see it. SeasonSummer fruiting. UseVitamin C in a landscape that will otherwise deny it to you. The pulp comes in caviar like beads. Anti scorbutic, which matters more than it sounds once the tinned fruit runs out. CautionSharp thorns, otherwise safe. Nothing else looks like it.

Midyim berry Austromyrtus dulcisEdible▶

WhereCoastal heath and sandy country, Sunshine Coast and Moreton Bay islands. SeasonLate summer to autumn. UseSmall white speckled berries, sweet and immediately edible off the bush. One of the few native fruits requiring no preparation and no courage. CautionLow growing; positively identify the speckling. Safe when correct.

Warrigal greens Tetragonia tetragonioidesEdible▶

WhereCoastal dunes, disturbed ground, old gardens. Sprawls as ground cover, abundant and forgiving. SeasonYear round in the subtropics. UseThe closest thing to spinach the bush provides. A reliable green when your body is quietly starving for one. CautionHigh in oxalates. Blanch it, thirty seconds in boiling water, discard the water. Do not eat it raw in quantity.

Lilly pilly Syzygium / Acmena spp.Edible▶

WhereWidespread: rainforest, street plantings, suburban hedges across the whole region. SeasonSummer to autumn. UseTart pink and white berries, edible raw, better cooked down. Ubiquitous enough to be a genuine staple. The suburbs are full of them. CautionSeveral species, all edible; palatability varies wildly. Taste one before you fill a bag.

Wattleseed Acacia spp. (edible species only)Edible▶

WhereEverywhere. Acacia is the most common genus in the country. SeasonSeed pods through the warmer months. UseRoasted and ground: protein, carbohydrate, a nutty roasted coffee flavour. A drought proof staple for 40,000 years for good reason, it survives the weather that kills everything else. CautionNOT every acacia is edible and some are toxic. Learn the specific edible species before collapse, not during it. This is a book in advance skill.

Native ginger Alpinia caeruleaEdible▶

WhereRainforest floor, moist gullies, D'Aguilar and hinterland ranges. SeasonBlue fruit in the warmer months; rhizome year round. UseChew the pulp around the blue seeds; the rhizome is a milder ginger substitute. Useful flavour and a mild digestive aid when the diet is otherwise grim. CautionPositively identify the blue fruit and the ginger family leaf. Safe when correct.

Black bean / Moreton Bay chestnut Castanospermum australeDo not eat▶

WhereRainforest and creek lines throughout SEQ. Large glossy leaves, big brown seeds in heavy pods. WarningTOXIC without extensive preparation. Historically eaten only after days of slicing, roasting and leaching in running water. The seeds look like food and are not. Every year someone decides otherwise. Unless you know the full leaching process cold, treat it as poison.

Cycad / zamia palm Cycas / Macrozamia spp.Do not eat▶

WhereDry open forest and rocky slopes across the region. Palm like, with large seed cones. WarningSEVERELY TOXIC raw. Acute poisoning, and with repeated exposure permanent neurological damage, the "staggers". The seeds were food only after prolonged leaching over many days. If you do not know it, do not touch it.

Fishing Bulimba Creek

A tidal creek on your side of town, and a renewable protein line if you learn to read it. It moves salt and fresh with the tide and holds estuary fish. It is urban water, so the catch is food you must cook thoroughly, not a clean wild stream.

When and where

Fish the run of the tide, not the slack: the hour either side of the change is when they feed. Structure holds fish: bridge pylons, snags, drop offs, the mouths of drains.

What is in there

Bream are the mainstay, reliable and everywhere. Flathead sit on the sandy bottom on the drop of the tide. Sea mullet school through and take a cast net. Estuary catfish turn up too; their spines are venomous, handle with care and cut the line if unsure.

Bait and method

Prawn, worm and cut fish will catch bream. A cast net feeds you mullet without a rod at all, worth learning now. Light line and a small hook out fishes a heavy rig in a creek. Mud crabs and the odd blue swimmer move through: a witches hat or baited hand line gets them. Know the size and sex rules while there still are rules, never take a berried female.

Eat it safe

Urban runoff means bacteria. Cook everything through, never eat it raw, and gut fish away from your water and food. If a fish looks or smells wrong, it goes back.

Grow

Stores run out. A garden does not, if you keep it alive. You are renting, so think pots, wicking beds and quick wins, not a back paddock. A few pots will not feed you. The skill of keeping things alive when the inputs stop just might.

Start now, not later

Quick wins in Brisbane. Leafy greens, herbs, chillies, spring onions, cherry tomatoes and radishes all grow fast here and cut your fresh food dependence. Salad leaves go from seed to plate in weeks.
Grow what actually feeds you. Sweet potato, pumpkin, snake beans and silverbeet give real calories and shrug off the heat. Sweet potato is close to unkillable in a Brisbane summer.
Save seed. A seed saved is next season for free. Open pollinated varieties grow true; the supermarket hybrids do not. This is why Green Harvest (see Out there) is the most valuable place in this guide.
A pot of soil is a bank account. Every plant you keep alive now is a skill banked for when it stops being a hobby.

Feeding the soil without a fertiliser shop

The fertiliser supply is one of the first things to go (see Now), so learn to make your own. None of this needs a shop.

Compost

Kitchen scraps, garden waste, cardboard and dry leaves rot into free soil food. Layer wet and dry, keep it damp, turn it. The single most useful thing you can do with your rubbish.

Worm farm

A tub of worms turns food scraps into castings, the best fertiliser there is, plus a liquid you dilute and pour on. Fits a courtyard, needs almost nothing.

Comfrey and weed teas

Comfrey (see the apothecary below) grows like a weed and its leaves steeped in water make a free nitrogen and potassium feed. Most green weeds do the same. Steep, dilute, pour.

Urine, honestly

Diluted about one part in ten, human urine is a free, near sterile, high nitrogen fertiliser. Farmers have used it for millennia. It is not a joke, it is a resource, and in a fertiliser shortage it is the one input you will never run out of.

Wood ash and shells

Ash from a clean wood fire adds potassium and lime. Crushed eggshells add calcium. Both go into the compost or straight around the plants.

Let legumes do it

Beans, peas and pigeon pea pull nitrogen out of the air and into the soil for free. Grow them in rotation and they feed the bed for the next crop.

When the soil itself is dying

Keep the living soil alive through the heat

Soil is not dirt. It is a living thing, full of fungi and microbes that feed your plants. A brutal El Niño summer and bare, baked ground kills them, and dead soil grows nothing no matter what you add to it. Protecting the life in the soil is the real job.

Mulch, heavily. A thick blanket of straw, leaves or cardboard over every bit of bare soil keeps it cool, holds moisture, and shelters the life underneath. Bare soil in a Brisbane summer is a graveyard.
Do not dig. Turning the soil tears apart the fungal networks that hold it together. Feed the top and let the worms do the digging.
Keep something growing. Living roots feed the soil. Even a cover of weeds beats bare ground.
Re inoculate. A handful of compost or worm castings, or a scoop of soil from a healthy shady spot, reseeds dead ground with life. Living soil spreads if you let it.
Water deep and early. A good soak at dawn beats a daily sprinkle. It sends roots down and keeps the soil cooler through the day.

When there are no bees

Be the bee

Pollinator numbers crash in heat, drought and collapse, and no pollination means flowers but no fruit. You can do the job by hand.

Hand pollinate. A small paintbrush or cotton bud, dab pollen from flower to flower. Pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers carry separate male and female flowers: pick a male, strip its petals, and brush its centre into the female, the one with a tiny fruit already behind it.
Grow the self reliant crops. Tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuce and most leafy greens pollinate themselves or need only a breeze. A gentle shake of a flowering tomato does the work.
Bring the pollinators back. Flowers among the vegetables, marigold, nasturtium, basil left to flower, pull in whatever bees and hoverflies are left. Never spray anything that would kill them.

Growing through a Brisbane heatwave

Afternoon shade. Shade cloth or the shady side of a wall keeps plants alive through the worst of it. Morning sun, afternoon shelter.
Choose the tough crops. Sweet potato, okra, snake bean, Ceylon spinach, amaranth, chilli, cassava and pigeon pea handle subtropical heat that kills lettuce and English spinach.
Water at dawn. Never in the heat of the day, and water the soil, not the leaves.
Wicking pots. A pot that waters from a reservoir below survives days without you and wastes almost nothing, which matters when water is rationed.

The garden apothecary

You cannot store health, but you can grow some of it. These medicinal herbs grow in frost free Brisbane, in pots or the ground. They are a supplement to the med kit in Health, not a replacement for it.

Read this before you use any of them

Herbs are medicine, which means they have doses, cautions and interactions like any drug. Positively identify the plant. Know the dose. Some interact with prescription medications, some are unsafe in pregnancy, and comfrey is for the skin only, never swallowed. A herb is not a hospital. Use these for the small, ordinary problems, and keep the honest limits from Health in mind for everything else.

Aloe vera Burns, sunburn, minor cutsGrow it▶

GrowsAlmost unkillable in a pot in full Brisbane sun, thrives on neglect and drought. UseSnap a leaf, squeeze the clear gel straight onto a burn, sunburn or minor cut. Cooling, soothing, and the one plant every hot climate household should have by the door.

Comfrey Sprains, bruises, closed breaksGrow it▶

GrowsLike a weed, and once in it is hard to remove. Doubles as a fertiliser plant (see above). UseKnown for centuries as knitbone. Crushed leaves as a poultice over a sprain, bruise or closed break ease pain and swelling. WarningExternal use only. Never eat it or drink it as a tea, it damages the liver. On unbroken skin, only.

Calendula Wounds, skin, antisepticGrow it▶

GrowsEasy from seed, cheerful orange flowers, self seeds happily. UseThe petals, infused in oil or as a wash, clean and help heal cuts, grazes and irritated skin. A gentle, reliable wound herb.

Ginger and turmeric Nausea, digestion, inflammationGrow it▶

GrowsSubtropical by nature and right at home here. Plant a rhizome in part shade, water well, dig it up when the leaves die back. UseGinger tea settles nausea, travel sickness and an unhappy gut. Turmeric is an anti inflammatory taken in food or as a paste on the skin. Both keep for months as dried powder.

Mint and lemon balm Digestion, nausea, calmGrow it▶

GrowsBoth grow like weeds, so keep them in pots or they take the bed. Happy in Brisbane shade and damp. UsePeppermint tea for digestion, wind and nausea. Lemon balm tea to calm nerves and help sleep, and rubbed on cold sores.

Thyme and sage Coughs, sore throats, antisepticGrow it▶

GrowsMediterranean herbs, they want full sun and sharp drainage, happy in a dry pot. UseThyme tea or steam for coughs and chest colds, a genuine antiseptic. Sage tea as a gargle for a sore throat.

Yarrow Slows bleeding, woundsGrow it▶

GrowsTough, drought hardy, ferny leaves and flat flower heads. Survives poor soil. UseCrushed leaves packed onto a cut help slow bleeding, an old battlefield wound herb. Also works as a wound wash.

Off grid

When the power goes, everything quiet in your house goes with it: the lights, the fridge, the phone charger, the pump, the toilet. None of it is hard to work around if you sorted it before the lights went out. All of it is miserable to work out in the dark.

Power and light

Light

A head torch each beats a hand torch, it leaves your hands free. Battery lanterns light a whole room. Keep a stack of spare batteries and a set of rechargeables with a charger. Candles work but they start fires, so treat them as backup, not the plan.

Keeping phones alive

A big power bank, kept charged, runs a phone for days. Two is better. Your car is a generator: a cheap 12 volt USB adapter charges everything off the socket, engine off in short bursts to save fuel.

Solar, the real fix

A small folding solar panel and a battery bank keeps phones, torches and the radio running indefinitely, sun permitting, which in Brisbane it usually is. This is the difference between power that runs out and power that does not.

The car

It charges devices, runs the radio, and its aircon is your cooling of last resort on a brutal day. All of it costs fuel, which is dear and finite (see Now), so use it on purpose, not idly.

Keep one power bank always full and rotate them. A flat power bank in a blackout is a paperweight with good intentions.

Staying in contact

Phones and the internet are the first things to fail, or to jam solid with everyone trying at once. Have a way to get news and a way to reach each other that needs no network.

A radio for news. A battery or wind up radio tuned to ABC Radio Brisbane on 612 AM, the official emergency broadcaster. It works when nothing else does.
Handheld UHF radios. A cheap pair of UHF CB handhelds lets you and Will talk across a few kilometres with no phone network and no licence needed. Worth having, worth practising with before you need them.
Agree the plan now. A meeting point if you are separated, a time you both check in, and one out of area contact you both ring. A call out of the city often gets through when local lines are jammed. Write it on paper, because the phone with the numbers in it may be the thing that died.
Text, do not call. A text slips through a congested network when a call will not. And a whistle each covers the last hundred metres when nothing electronic works.

When the toilet stops

No water means no flushing

If the water or the sewer stops, so does the toilet. Do not keep flushing a dead system, it backs up into the house, and now you have a sanitation emergency indoors. Sanitation failure is one of the great killers in any collapse (see The plan), and it is entirely preventable with a bucket and some discipline.

The bucket method

Two buckets with lids. One for wee, one for the rest. Keeping them apart cuts the smell and the volume dramatically.
Line the solids bucket, and after each use cover it with a scoop of sawdust, soil, shredded paper or cheap cat litter. The cover is what kills the smell and keeps the flies off.
Lid it between uses, and keep it, and every trace of waste, well away from all food and water. This one rule prevents more disease than any medicine.
Wash or sanitise your hands every single time. Soap and a little water, or ash and water if it comes to that.

Stock for it now: bin liners, a couple of lidded buckets, a bag of sawdust or litter, soap, hand sanitiser, and more toilet paper than you think you need. It is the first thing to vanish from the shops and a genuine barter item.

Greywater

The water you washed in still has a job. Tip washing and rinsing water on the garden, not on anything you eat raw, or keep it to flush a toilet by hand if the sewer still runs but the water does not. Waste nothing in a dry year.

Cooking with no power

Covered in Stores, worth repeating here: a gas camp stove with spare canisters is the easy answer, and a small wood or rocket stove outdoors is the backup. Never run either indoors, carbon monoxide has no smell and no mercy. One pot meals save both fuel and washing water.

Fire & heat

With a strong El Niño settling in (see Now), this is the threat the forecast actually points at for the summer ahead. Not a wall of flame down your street in Runcorn, that is unlikely on the suburban southside. Ember attack, grassfire, choking smoke, and the quiet killer, heat, are the real risks, in the city and worse on the fringes you might run to.

Bushfire and ember attack

Embers burn down more houses than flames

Most homes lost to bushfire are not hit by the fire front. They are lit by embers blown ahead of it, landing in gutters, on doormats, in a pile of mulch against a wall, hours before or after the fire itself. Deny the embers anywhere to catch and you have done most of the defending.

Clear the catch points. Leaves out of the gutters, flammable clutter away from the walls (doormats, mulch, firewood, pot plants), gas bottles turned off and clear. Keep a defended gap around the house.
Know the day. Check the Fire Danger Rating and any total fire ban on ABC 612 and the BOM. Catastrophic means leave early. Not pack early. Leave.
Decide your trigger in advance. The single biggest killer is leaving too late and being caught on the road in the smoke. Pick the warning level or rating that means you go, agree it with Will now, and act on it without a debate on the day.
Leaving early is always the safest option. The go bag (see Stores) lives by the door through fire season. Know two ways out (see Out there), because one may be closed by fire or by traffic.
If you are ever caught and cannot leave, the safest place is inside a solid house as the front passes, then outside to put out embers once it has gone through. The house shelters you from the front, you save the house from the embers after.

Smoke

Smoke reaches the city long before any fire does, and it is dangerous on its own, especially for anyone with asthma or a chest condition. Close the house up, wear a P2 mask if you have to be out in it, and keep an eye on how everyone is breathing, the cats included. The coolest, most sealed room with the fewest gaps is your refuge if the air outside turns thick.

The extreme heat day

The most likely dangerous day of your summer

A 40 degree day with no power and no aircon is more likely to hurt the two of you than any fire or any stranger. Heat kills quietly. The medical side, spotting heat exhaustion before it becomes heat stroke, lives in Health and cats and is essential reading. This is what to actually do with the day itself.

Flip the day. Rest through the worst of the heat, do anything that needs doing at dawn and dusk. Fighting the middle of the day is a fight you lose.
Trap the cool. Close the house up, blinds down, in the morning before it heats. Open it right up at night to flush the heat out. Live in the coolest room, usually low and on the shaded side.
Cool the body, not the room. A wet shirt in front of any moving air, a damp cloth on the neck and wrists, feet in a bucket of water. Evaporation is free air conditioning.
Drink to thirst and take electrolytes, not just plain water, or you wash your salts out (see Health and cats for the why and the recipe).
The car aircon is the emergency option, for you and for an overheating cat, fuel permitting. Never leave anyone, or a cat, shut in a parked car for a second.

Keep the cats cool too

They cannot sweat and they will not tell you. Give them a damp towel to lie on, shade, water in more than one spot, and a cool tiled floor. A panting cat is in real trouble and needs cooling now (see Health and cats). Watch the oldest and the most anxious one closest.

Out there

Runcorn is southside. That is the good news: you never need to cross the river to get out. Read the city as bottlenecks and open ground, and the region as a ring of high ground around a hot, crowded plain. The map is the one piece of equipment that does not stop working.

The principle

Bugging in is almost always safer than bugging out. You leave only if staying is more dangerous than the road, which is a high bar. If you go, go early, before everyone has the same idea, or late, after the surge. Never in the middle of the rush.

Reading the map

Avoid the CBD, the river crossings, the Gateway and the major motorways in a crisis. That is where crowds and trouble concentrate. Brisbane's chokepoints are the river and its bridges.
Toward help. The network sits mostly south and west of you, away from the river bottleneck. That is your direction.
Open ground. Further south and west is the Scenic Rim and the ranges: space, water, distance from density.
Know two ways to every waypoint, because one will be blocked.
Flood is the region's signature disaster. The Brisbane River and the Lockyer Valley flood catastrophically and repeatedly: 1974, 2011, 2022. Never shelter on a floodplain, however fertile.
Heat is the quiet killer. Elevation buys you degrees; the hinterland is meaningfully cooler than the plain.

The ring of high ground

D'Aguilar Range. The forested spine north west of Brisbane. Close, wet, timbered. First refuge from the city.
Scenic Rim. The southern arc (Mount Barney, the border ranges). High rainfall, real farmland in the valleys, thin population.
Toowoomba escarpment. The western wall. Climb it and you are on the Darling Downs: grain, grazing, Crows Nest.
Bunya Mountains. The far north western highland. The deep refuge.

The highways (Warrego west, Cunningham south west, New England to the Downs, Bruce north) are arteries and chokepoints both: fast when open, a trap when everyone has the same idea. The map is the one thing that does not stop working. Learn it now, while it is still just a nice drive.

The network

Two people cannot cover everything. These are the people worth coordinating with, what they bring, and where they are. Talk to them now, quietly, before anything happens. This is the real survival plan; the rest is logistics.

Will

With you, Runcorn

Practical and hands on, handles maintenance and repair. Your second pair of hands and the person who fixes what breaks. The core of the household.

Will's parents

Carina, east, inner south

Close by and on your side of the river. A second base and a short, low risk move if you ever need to consolidate east.

Will's brother and partner

Kenmore, west

The partner has an entomology and nature background. Genuinely valuable: foraging, ecology, insects as protein, reading the land. The knowledge node of the network.

Danielle Preston

Chambers Flat, further south

Biosecurity Queensland, invasive species. Land and pest management, plant and animal knowledge, and a location with more room and more distance from the city. Your best southern run if density becomes the threat.

Your sister is deliberately not on this map. That is a considered call, not an oversight, and it stays that way.

Places worth the journey

Green Harvest Maleny, Sunshine Coast hinterlandPriority▶

What it isFamily run organic seed supplier trading since 1992, the first certified organic seed business in the country, in a rammed earth shed on Gumland Drive. Why it mattersThe single most valuable location in this guide and it is not close. Everything else feeds you once; a seed bank feeds you every year after. Open pollinated, heirloom, region tested seed that grows true and can be re saved, unlike the sterile hybrids in every supermarket. Whoever holds the seed holds the second year. Minutes from Lake Baroon: water and seed within the same short walk.