On this block the emergency gear is split between the ute and the workshop, not the house. The sat phone lives in the glovebox with the snakebite bandages and a printed list of 000, the local police, and UHF CB channel 5 plus local repeater frequencies. I test the handheld on channel 5 every Sunday when the generator runs, because the creek flat behind the shed has no mobile or repeater coverage. A long-handled bolt cutter stays on a hook by the front gate, since a locked gate is the first thing that stops you when smoke is already across the road.
On my patch of mulga in western Queensland, after the wet season drowned every track and the creek sat at bridge level for weeks, I waited 42 days for a rescue chopper. That wait rubbed my nose in a fact no first aid course drilled hard enough: the most carefully stocked kit is just an expensive cupboard of bandages without a satellite phone and a written evacuation plan taped to its lid. I now carry an Iridium 9555 handset—a tough, rainforest-proof brick that cost me $1,800 new—loaded with a Pivotel prepaid SIM.
The SIM runs about $200 for a 12-month voucher and gives 200 minutes of talk time, enough for a full-blown emergency and a handful of check-ins to relatives who imagine you’ve been eaten by pigs. The phone lives in a waterproof Pelican case inside the kit, and every three months I pull it out to confirm it locks onto the network. The written plan replaced a scrap of cardboard I once scribbled on with a Texta. Now it’s a single A4 sheet in a zip-lock sleeve, written in 14-point type so a stranger can read it by headtorch.
It lists the exact AMG grid reference from the 1:250,000 topo sheet, the landing zone cleared to a 30-metre diameter on the claypan nearest the house (slope under 3°, no overhead wires),
— Jenny. Paperwork first, then the fun part.
ArticlesCalculatorsSite PlannerShopA well-stocked bug-out bag is your lifeline during sudden evacuations, but it must stay under 20 lbs and be compact. Pack shelter, water, food, navigation, and survival tools that serve multiple purposes. I learned the hard way to test your kit's contents during practice drills; my clogged filter and burst meal pouch during a recent drill proved that theoretical gear fails without real-world checks.
I keep a bug‑out bag (BOB) ready for sudden evacuations. It must stay under 20 lbs, so I choose compact, multi‑use gear for shelter, water, food, navigation and survival tools. I run a quick drill with the pack every few months—if anything rattles or fails, I fix it before I need it.
The Ready Up 72-Hour Bug Out Bag retails for $295 direct from the Brisbane warehouse. The 50L pack uses 600D polyester with a clamshell opening—stiff enough that blackberry runners slide off instead of hooking, unlike the ripstop daypacks that shred after two creek crossings in the Mary Valley. Inside is a water filter (Sawyer Mini), an emergency blanket, and a bundle of survival tools: ferro rod, wire saw, button compass, multitool, and tinder tabs.
I opened one at a Kumbia workshop and found the zip pulls seized within the first dry run; a squirt of silicone spray off the motorbike shelf freed them. The no-name medical shears couldn’t cut a rolled bandage cleanly. For a beginner who wants everything in one box, the kit saves a three-hour loop between An
I store at least 1 gallon per person per day for 2 weeks. When a flash flood hit my place, the surge turned the creek into a silt‑laden torrent and my filter’s pre‑filter clogged with fine particles, cutting off clean water even though I had the gear ready. I use food‑grade containers, like #5 plastic, and rotate water every 6 months. For purification I carry a portable filter or purification tablets to treat natural sources.
Recommended: LifeStraw Personal Water Filter ' Removes 99.9999% of bacteria and parasites. Weighs 2.4 oz and fits in your pocket for immediate use.
During the 2020 bushfires, my dehydrated meal pouch burst in the heat, spilling dust where I needed fuel. Focus on calorie-dense, non-perishable foods with a 10+ year shelf life. Rotate stock annually and store in airtight containers. Include a mix of meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and snacks for energy bursts.
Recommended: Mountain House Sourdough Bread ' 25-year shelf life, 300+ calories per serving, and requires only hot water. Includes 12 meals in a compact pouch.
Standard kits miss wilderness‑specific gear, so I toss in tourniquets, hemostatic gauze, trauma pads and my prescription meds. I also pack a digital thermometer and a field guide for wilderness injuries. A clogged filter or a split vacuum‑seal on a freeze‑dried pack will leave me without the means to treat a wound or monitor a fever.
The Adventure Medical Kits Wilderness First Aid Kit lives in the passenger footwell of the Troopy because the glovebox is already full of fence strainer pins and half a packet of stale Clix. I bought mine from Snowys in Adelaide three years ago for $109, back when freight was still ten bucks and a dream. You can now find it at Tentworld or Wild Earth for around $130, and it still stings less than a night at the Royal Flying Doctor base in Meekatharra.
The kit tips the scales at just over a kilogram and takes up no more room than a 2-litre billy. Inside are the 120-odd parts the label promises—forceps long enough to retrieve a grass seed from a kelpie’s ear canal, a SAM splint that moulds into a rigid cradle for a suspected greenstick fracture, an emergency blanket the colour of a fresh Colorbond fence, and a blister care block that has drained more heels than a podiatry clinic.
The splint has done double duty immobilising a brown snake bite on a bloke near Burra; I lashed it with a crepe bandage from the local chemist because the kit’s own elastic wrap ran out last December. That’s the cause-and-effect reality: every time you crack the seal, you sacrifice one component, and the inventory drops until you replace it.
I raid the Golden North bin in the IGA for a cardboard lid and scribble a restock list straight after an event—usually more 10 cm conforming gauze, another tube of Betadine, and a fresh set of nitrile gloves that don’t turn to crêpe paper after a summer under the tonneau. For the Australian paddock, I don’t trust the little squeeze bottle of antiseptic wipes alone, so I add a 50 mL pump of Isocol—available at any servo for less than a tenner—and a second emergency blanket because hypothermia claims more lost musterers here than snakebite ever will.
The kit’s original tape is good for strapping a split finger, but for fixing a stiff ankle to a stirrup iron you’ll want a roll of Elastoplast Rigid Strapping Tape, 3.8 cm, number 5401, stocked at every Chemist Warehouse for about $15. None of that is in the box; it’s just what works when you’re 80 km from a bitumen road and the UHF is crackling static.
Mobile towers fail early in a disaster. When the Telstra and Optus sites on the Tweed Range went silent during the 2022 northern NSW floods, every smartphone on the property became a paperweight. Satellite communicators become the only practical way to trigger an SOS and pull down a Bureau of Meteorology severe weather update. I learned the cause-and-effect the hard way after a flash flood in the upper Widden Valley shorted the battery compartment of my GME MT410G PLB, leaving us with no way to call for help as the causeway washed out.
The unit was under the seat in a supposedly dry Pelican case, but the seal had perished. That 406 MHz PLB – registered with AMSA, purchase price around $350 – was dead when I needed to punch the distress button. Now a Garmin inReach Mini 2 sits in a true waterproof pouch inside the glovebox, and I test the battery contacts with a multimeter every three months. A ZOLEO satellite communicator runs about $300 plus a $20/month AMSA-compatible plan; both models deliver an SMS-based SOS and pull BoM warnings via the Iridium network when no ground tower is listening.
Set a family meeting point that works even when the property is cut in half by water. Ours is the big ironbark 200 metres up the ridge behind the shearing shed, marked with reflective tape on the trunk. Backup communication methods – hand‑crank UHF radios tuned to the citizen band emergency repeaters on channels 5 and 35, signal mirrors – are in the crate with the first-aid kit before the wet season, not after it.
A Uniden UH720SX-2 handheld with a dynamo crank costs around $100 and, with its NiMH battery fully charged, will last a week of reception if you ration the talk time. The signal mirror is a simple glass-and-plastic 50 mm × 75 mm model from an army disposal store in Lismore, cost $12, and it has already flagged a passing NPWS chopper when the radio was flat.
The Garmin inReach Mini 2 weighs 100 g and fits in the palm of your hand, a fact I appreciate every time I clip it to the belt of my King Gee work shorts before walking the back paddock at our block near Glen Innes. It sends SOS via satellite over the Iridium network — no service plan required for SOS, so even if your subscription is lapsed and you tumble down a quartz scree slope, the signal goes to the GEOS centre then hands off to AMSA in Canberra.
Tracks location, dropping a point every ten minutes onto the Garmin Explore app on my phone, which let my husband find me last autumn when I was stuck in a blackberry gully after dark retrieving a prolapsed ewe. Messages via the Garmin app pop up on the phone screen; I’ve used that to tell the clinic I’d be late when the Hilux bogged to the axles in a soaks. Works globally, from the Simpson Desert to the Tasmanian highlands.
The unit costs $549 at the local Anaconda or BCF, and you’ll want a Freedom plan for tracking and messaging — about $25 for the month you activate it, then suspend it when the fire season ends. I charge it off a little USB solar panel in the ute; battery runs four days of ten-minute tracking in real use.
While many off-grid projects are achievable as DIY, certain situations require licensed professionals:
Before I could plumb the new 22,500-litre rainwater tank at my Bellingen place I spent more time at the council counter than I did in the trench. Bellingen Shire Council wanted a development application for the tank pad on a rural block zoned RU2, even though the tank was a standard Polymaster model trucked up from Coffs Harbour for $2,850. The DA fee was $290, and the plumbing permit ran another $110. I’d dug the 600 mm deep foundation by hand, levelled it with road base, and thought I was done.
Then the council’s plumbing inspector pointed out that a gravity-fed line from a tank taller than the house’s internal floor level required a backflow prevention device fitted by a licensed plumber; my Bradflo 25 mm poly line and a non-return valve off the shelf at Bunnings didn’t meet AS/NZS 3500.1. That visit cost me a $330 re-inspection fee and a plumber’s invoice for $480. Down on the flats my greywater system is a different dance. Before I could run a hose from the laundry to a sub-surface trench, I needed an approval under the Local
Worth a watch: SHTF Power Outages: Essential Gear for Surviving Off the Grid · prepping4tomorrow
I treat my 72-hour go-bag as the gear I can grab in under a minute if we need to evacuate, and I aim to keep the whole thing under 20 pounds so I'm not fumbling with it in a panic. Mine covers the basics for water, food, shelter and first aid, but I also tuck in the small stuff that matters when you're heading out fast — copies of IDs, cash, and a torch. The trick is packing only what you truly need for three days, because a heavy bag ends up left behind.
My water drum is the first thing I check when the power fails, because without pressure or filtration running, things can go south quickly. I keep enough treated water stored to cover the household for at least a few days, and I rotate it through so nothing goes stagnant. If the supply's iffy, I'll boil before I drink, every time.
I've been caught out when the network went down and learned the hard way that relying on the one bar on your phone is a rubbish plan. My setup now includes a backup communication option that doesn't depend on the mobile towers, so I can still check in when the grid is well and truly out. I also let family know the plan before anything happens, so they know not to panic if they don't hear from me straight away.
Even after years as a remote-area nurse, I know there's a line between what I can patch up at home and what genuinely needs a professional, and I don't cross that line just to feel brave. Anything that's getting worse despite basic first aid, anything involving chest pain, severe bleeding, breathing trouble, or head injuries — that's when I'm calling. Off-grid doesn't mean off-duty for common sense.