Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Preface
The end is nigh. That much is clear. NASA gives us fifteen years before human life downright no longer exists. We might find the Doomsday Preppers rather funny, but deep down, we know they’re right. Dehydrate those bananas and stock up on tinned beans cuz we’re in for a wild and stormy ride.
This is a guide for good people. If you are an arsehole, only interested in the survival of yourself and your immediate family, go fuck yourself. Go join the Jehovah’s Witnesses or some other insular sect for taking care of one’s own.
This guide is part comedy, part tips on community organising to keep your apocalypse bunker free from arseholes, part practical tips on sustainable living, and (since my friend Mev convinced me that my young life has been so interesting, I should write a memoir), part self-indulgent instruction of how I will survive the apocalypse.
This is a guide for creating a modern system of autonomous self-governance where equity and freedom are the name of the game, where people are welcome regardless of race, gender binaries, physical abilities or age. So yeah, this book is actually about building a really, really, giant, fuck off massive bunker. In fact the bunker will be so big that if NASA says we’ve only got fifteen years, well, you’d better start diggin’ boys and girls, cuz it will take you that long to dig a bunker big enough to fit your whole community.
Your time starts now!
A Word About Me
I am 38 and have always spent my time doing some kind of organising for social justice or the environment. I spend my days working at a local government agency engaging with community members to encourage sustainable living practices, and my nights wrangling two pre-school age children. I try to ensure my family has as tiny an ecological footprint as possible, but I know that capitalism and industry have a way more negative environmental impact than my family will ever have. The five minute showers of all my family members, neighbours and friends are never going to have as much impact on our water supplies than the mining industry.
A previous incarnation of myself once believed that bringing even more white-fossil-fuel-vandal children into the world was a heinous crime. But it’s lucky we change our views. Imagine if we all just stayed the same and no one ever developed their views? It’s called progress. And I for one am pretty happy that my family of four is pretty much only leaving the environmental footprint of two average Coburgians.
I’ve done loads of weird jobs and lots of other weird things for fun. I’ve played in loads of all girl rock bands. I’ve been a stripper. I spent seven years living in squats, the cleanest and most well organised squats you’ve ever seen. I’ve travelled extensively and now I’m pretty much ready to calm the fuck down just be as effective as I can be at bringing about a better situation than the pending apocalypse.
On Arseholes
Seen The Walking Dead? What exactly did you learn? I learned that it’s mighty easy for arseholes to take over when the State falls. But if we agree there’ll come a time when we can no longer rely on any semblance of social democracy to support our schools or to regulate our food production, we’ll need to challenge that popular trope that “chaos and anarchy” are the inevitable consequence of government disintegration. We’ll need to out-organise the arseholes!
Seen Zombieland? What did you learn? Aside from always buckling up before accelerating, and when the end of the world really does come, please try a bit harder to keep Bill Murray alive, even people who seem like arseholes like Woody Harrelson’s character Tallahassee can actually be won over as life circumstances rapidly change. Arseholes might just find it’s in their self-interest to support the regime of mutual aid and solidarity.
So yeah, how’s about that apocalypse, huh?
The ecological footprint of the human race is now so ginormous that even if we completely shifted out dependence on fossil fuels to one hundred percent renewables by 2030, we’d still be staring down the barrel of a 2 per cent global temperature increase. You know it, I know it. The 2007 Black Saturday fires, the 2015 Christmas Day fires on the Great Ocean Road, coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, the loss of five of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, now completely submerged with residents forced to relocate, the prediction that sea levels will rise between 3-6 meters. And these are just the extreme so called “weather events” that we know about let alone the ones we don’t.
Let’s face it, we’re pretty much rooted and it’s not as if we’re going to stop using fossil fuels anytime soon. People are living in denial. If anything it’s like a race to the finish line. We’re building more brand new, pre-fab, disposable McMansions, built to last just thirty years or so, because despite the massive environmental waste, people will want to knock it down and build a new house by then anyway. We keep building new freeways. Ford moved offshore because the Aussie market is too small for their desired profits and they want to sell millions more cars per year than they could pump out from Broadmeadows or Corio. And Ford is not about to slow down car sales and go into bike production anytime soon.
As far as having kids is concerned, three is apparently the new two and five is the new four, and we can read all about this in the newspaper articles titled “Children: the ultimate status symbol”. So all those masses of kids can grow up and buy their own disposable McMansions and imported Fords to drive on their new freeways to their beach houses that will soon be engulfed by rising sea levels, or their bush blocks that will soon be burned by some kind of “freak” fire that won’t actually be a freak fire at all, it will be a totally predictable fire that some people refuse to acknowledge as predictable. What’s not predictable is how we will respond to the coming events. Some people used to say it’s all about prevention and precaution. But the arseholes are currently ruining it for everyone, so it’s all about preparation and adaptation.
Community building, or how to make friends and influence people, and why we shouldn’t let arseholes take charge any more
Remember how the arseholes ruined it for everyone? Well fuck them. Why are you letting them be in charge anyway? I’m not about to advocate taking a baseball bat to the skull of every driver of a Toorak Tractor to curb the population (carbon credits anyone?) It seriously doesn’t need to be that kind of apocalypse. Well… not yet anyway.
The secret of your success will be that people will like you. No one likes a baseball bat wielding psychopath, even if they know there’s a way more insidious class war being perpetrated by the drivers of that Toorak Tractor, involving criminally low wages in some work sectors such as fruit and veg pickers and packers, seven eleven workers, childcare staff and taxi drivers. I’m sorry but at this point in history, baseball bats are just not a vote winner.
You will deliberately lead by example and distinguish yourself from politicians like Bill Shorten, who pretty much nobody likes, not even in the union movement. He has really close friends who are genuinely arseholes – Kimberly Kitching and Andrew Landeryou, the wanna-be up and coming power couple of the ALP whose rampaging antics include defacing Greens and Liberal Party billboards and lying under oath to the Industrial Relations Commission about the misappropriation of union membership dues. In fact, I recommend using Kitching and Landeryou as a benchmark of how not to behave. In your journey to be the type of community leader who will get us through the apocalypse, you can regularly ask yourself, “What would Kitching or Landeryou do?” Then, do the exact opposite.
Being resourceful with food, or why cool people eat weeds
DISCALIMER: Know your weeds, make sure they don’t kill you. Although pretty much no Melbournian weeds will kill you.
My cool mate Adam “Grubby” Grubb is one of the coolest people I know. He co-authored a book called The Weed Forager’s Handbook. In the words of Molly Meldrum, Do Yourself a Favour and buy a copy! Not only will this book help you be cool like Grubby, it will also teach you the difference between a weed that will be delightful to eat, and a weed that might make you sick, but probably won’t kill you.
My cool mate Grubby eats weeds because they provide all the nutrition that your home grown, over-priced, Diggers Club organic spinach plants provide, except there’s no risk you’ll run out after they wilt and die in the Aussie summer sun, because these little buggers are everywhere, and they’re FREE. If you’re time poor, which you probably are, or at least think you are cuz that’s how most of us seem to role these days, you should pretty much just stop growing leafy greens and just head down to your local park / weed factory for your daily intake of folic acid.
Cool people eat weeds because they have better things to do than grow stuff that’s already growing in the park. Cool people eat weeds because in the pending apocalypse, we will actually really be time poor.
On Escape to the Country, Having Kids And The Clarity of Wacking Up Stillnox
So I’m not the only one to look at real estate online in search of an escape to the country. Exhausted commuters on the evening trains seek comfort from the drudgery of their nine-to-five routines. Realestate.com.au has the highest number of hits of any website and it’s people like me and you with our house-porn fantasies.
My fantasy is to provide stability for my young family so we don’t have to keep moving in a rental market where security of tenure often doesn’t extend past 12 months. I fucked up by having a life in my twenties. After Uni, while me mates were working full time and buying their first apartments, I wanted more out of life. So I travelled constantly, worked in bars and played in bands. I lived off the smell of an oily rag (good life skill by the way, pending apocalypse and all. There’ll be plenty of oily rags to go round, that’s for sure).
Now that I’m 38, I’ve finally conformed to full time work and paying my bills thanks to the realisation that unless I create some kind of financial buffer, the economy is going to totally fuck up my kids’ lives. By the time they’re of age, there most likely won’t be a Newstart or an Old Age Pension for them to fall back on.
It took a while for this realisation to kick in. About 8 years before I had my first kid, my junky boyfriend at the time (who knew I was better than that) had just wacked up some Stilnox and was busy hallucinating in the middle of Brunswick street at peak hour. I wrangled him on to a tram and for my efforts he very publicly and very convincingly tried to break up with me, dozens of tram commuters as his witness.
“Liz, what are you doing with your life? Get a job. You’re lost. (Yes, the irony of it all). You need Superannuation because neoliberalism is going to rip the privilege of the Pension right out of the economy. You’re going to have kids, and based on your choice of romantic partners that I’ve seen, you’re going to choose a dud Dad for them. So they will rely on you to run the household. Those kids will have no Newstart. Get your act together”.
And with that, he stumbled off the tram and back into oncoming traffic. By some fluke of luck (and some good driving on behalf of City of Yarra commuters), said junky ex-boyfriend lives to see these economic changes taking place.
Thanks Junky Ex-Boyfriend, and thanks to your dodgy choice of intravenous drugs. If you’d found heroine that afternoon, I highly doubt you would have hallucinated and imparted such jems of wisdom that have helped my family.
I can proudly say that I have just purchased my own Escape to the Country, mud brick, hippy extravaganza and yes, you can all come over.
Local power generation and distribution
Got solar panels and storage batteries? Together let’s learn how to pool and store our power. Let’s read Murray Bookchin and talk about this later. Right now I have to smash out some more words for the 10pm Gunnas Masterclass Posting deadline, and the kids only just go to sleep.
So what do we actually need as opposed to want? (don’t worry, instructions on brewing beer will be included in this chapter at a later date).
When the economic crisis hit in Greece, suddenly there was no work and no money, and people had to learn from the older, wider folks about bartering and swapping. I hope you like making preserves and can use a sewing machine, because your community will surely need these skills! Or do you know how to teach maths? Because Mrs Brand’s five children will need to calculate their prediction of just how long their Paradise Beach holiday house on the Gippsland Lakes will last before it’s swept into the sea. And better for them to be one step ahead of the insurance company!
Stay tuned for the next instalment of the People’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse, titled, “Will there be sex work after the revolution? Or That Time I Was A Stripper”