‘You’re not such a crazy conspiracy theorist any more’: Preppers go mainstream

This story is part of the April 20 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Nine men, all white, some with muscles bulging under their T-shirts, have driven to the end of a dirt road at Mangrove Mountain on the NSW Central Coast. They’re here to attend a three-day camping course on sustainable foraging and bushcraft. It’s a crisp but sunny morning, and I’ve driven 90 minutes from Sydney to meet them here.

“Bit of a sausage fest,” jokes 48-year-old Jake Cassar, the bushcraft expert, conservationist and doomsday prepper who has been running courses like this for eight years, teaching more than 1000 people how to survive in the wild. Those attending today haven’t travelled far but other courses led by Cassar have drawn participants – including women – from across Australia.

The men sit in a semicircle, overlooking lush, green farmland, and explain the various reasons they’ve come. Most have wives, girlfriends or partners at home. Some say they want a greater sense of community and to make new friends; others explain they crave closeness to nature and want to learn how to survive in the bush. They all clearly admire Cassar and want to learn from a man who is living what he preaches.

Cassar asks the men if they know whose Indigenous land they’re on; a few do, and they acknowledge the traditional owners. He later suggests they be careful about what they post on social media, asking them to pay respect to nature and to Indigenous culture. Nathan, who has straggly hair and a beard and looks to be in his 30s, lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife and kids. “I’m often better with nature than people.” he says. “I have a survivalist mindset.”

Jake Cassar’s message is one of co-operation in the face of calamity. “We’re trying to rebuild the knowledge of our ancestors,” he says.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

The conversation turns towards poisonous plants and how to spot them. The risks of eating the wrong thing can be serious. Medicines can be extracted from trees, Cassar explains, but caution is necessary because some, such as oleander, can make you extremely sick or even kill you. On the other hand, “if you don’t have access to a pharmacy or hospital, any plant with antibacterial properties could save your life”. He’s sceptical about New Age herbalists “who’ve done a TAFE course for two months” then post on social media about plants they’ve raided from the bush. He reminds us that certain plants regenerate easily; others do not.

Cassar isn’t preaching rugged individualism – one person surviving in the face of calamity. “If shit hits the fan, it’ll be survival of the co-operative,” he says. Only people who know how to work together will thrive, is his message. “We’re trying to rebuild the knowledge of our ancestors,” he continues, echoing a theme I hear often while researching this story.

He tells the men how to identify animal, human and car tracks, and recommends a book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Forensics, for vital tips on tracking. By early afternoon, it’s time for him to reveal what the men will be eating tonight. He pulls out a dead echidna found on the side of the road the previous day. The animal is small, and I’m surprised to hear it will feed everyone. Cassar kneels on the ground and shows the men how to gut it, removing its organs and intestines. He places the heart on a pile of leaves with his now bloody hands, and fields questions about the best way to make it edible. Some of the men help cut off the animal’s paws – one of the few parts that can’t be eaten – with an axe, which are then placed in a silver bowl. The echidna will be boiled for hours.

Eating a lot of fruit and plants in the wild can cause “plumbing issues”, Cassar warns, so “you gotta stay on top of it” to avoid physical problems. “I talk about diarrhoea a lot,” he tells me. “It’s probably why I live alone in a hut in the bush.”

Cassar in his hut where he lives at Mangrove Mountain.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Wearing a floppy hat and a puffer vest which shows off his biceps and the tattoos on his arm, Cassar shows me about his nearby campsite. It’s not a truly remote area, being only a short drive from the local Mangrove Mountain cafe and shops, but there’s no electricity. He lives in a small hut with no windows, a short walk from a paved road, made with branches tied together with rope. “Ninety-eight per cent waterproof,” he says proudly. He enjoys training outdoors on a weight bench with rusty dumbbells.

He explains that it was impossible to live here for stretches at a time recently due to the endless rain. Last winter, because it was cold and his father was sick, he was “soft” and lived in a motel in a nearby town with heating. He now sleeps in the hut again, sometimes with his ex-partner and 10-year-old daughter.

Cassar has run unsuccessfully as an independent candidate in multiple NSW and federal elections, and campaigned strongly for a national park in the area (the Brisbane Water National Park on the NSW Central Coast is now a reality thanks to the lobbying of many people, including Cassar). With a Maltese, Egyptian and Italian background, he looks younger than a man approaching 50. He’s always loved the outdoors. “Some of my first memories are of poisoning myself with plants and getting stung,” he says.

‘We’re not fire-managing this country properly. We should be taking strong leadership from Aboriginal people who know how to manage the land.’

Jake Cassar

As a young man, he tended to hang out with the “wrong elements”, and there were many bruising times. Some of his friends took their own lives, while others became addicted to drugs. He worked for a decade as a nightclub bouncer on the Central Coast, during which time he educated himself about nature by voraciously reading books on plants. After he landed a job as a guide at a wildlife sanctuary, he routinely kept foundation in his car to cover up black eyes and bruises he’d receive by getting into scrapes in the car park during his bouncer work. He figured nature lovers wouldn’t appreciate the look.

Being so welcoming to a journalist is unusual among those who call themselves survivalists; most are sceptical of the media, refusing to speak or be quoted on the record. He does it because, despite his sunny disposition and cheeky quips, Cassar has serious fears about the general population’s lack of preparedness for any major emergency. “I’m deeply concerned about the future,” he tells me as we sit under a large tarp. “We’re not fire-managing this country properly. We should be taking strong leadership from Aboriginal people who know how to manage the land.”

While Cassar has enough stored supplies to feed 10 people for about two months, he says simply collecting a huge stock of canned food will not be enough if Australia is hit by any of the scenarios game-planned by preppers. Think nuclear strike, cyber attack, complete climate collapse, pandemics that will make COVID-19 look mild. While he doesn’t think the world is likely to end next week, he believes many Australians are living in a deluded state by refusing to prepare for such possibilities. “Ninety-five per cent of people wouldn’t have a clue how to keep themselves alive off the land for even the short-term,” he says.

Should any major crisis eventuate, Cassar himself will pull out his “bug-out bag” (short-term survival kit), his fishing gear and hunting traps. “You’re not such a crazy conspiracy theorist any more if you have the belief that there may be a time where we won’t have access to Coles, Woolies or the local pharmacy,” he contends. “More and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that food, medicine shortages and just general services could potentially be a problem.” For Cassar, prepping is a “really commonsense idea, especially with what we’ve seen around the world”.

Cassar using a piece of Sydney golden wattle to clean his hands.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

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The stereotypical image of doomsday prepping is of a family hunkered down in a bunker in the US with guns, cans of food and gas masks, bracing for a zombie invasion, natural disaster or governmental collapse. For some, the sense of feeling increasingly disinterested in political information, unable to solve the world’s problems, is paralysing. Recent research by the Reuters Institute think tank in Oxford found that 36 per cent of respondents in a global study on news consumption sometimes or often avoided following the news.

But it isn’t just the public freaking out. Bill McGuire, a volcanologist and Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, expressed the feeling of other climate experts in September 2023 when he tweeted: “I hope I am wrong and others may see things differently, but I am expecting effective societal collapse by mid-century, and planning – for my partner and I and our kids – accordingly.”

After the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, designing and building underground bunkers to protect people from extreme conditions shifted from the fringes in Australia to popular discussion. For residents who live in the “flame zone”, the highest risk areas, it makes sense to prepare for the worst.

There’s survivalism, though, and then there’s something much darker. For those sympathetic to extreme prepping, writes journalist Naomi Klein in her searing 2023 book, Doppelganger, this may help you and your family but few others. “I’ll be okay,” she writes, “I’m prepared, with my canned goods and solar panels and relative place of privilege on this planet – it’s other people who will suffer. The trouble with that narrative, though, is that it requires finding ways to live with and rationalise the mass suffering of others.“

Tom Doig, a Brisbane-based journalist and author of the forthcoming book We Are All Preppers Now, has spent years investigating the preppers world. He’s noticed a trend among the survivalists he meets. “Funnily enough – or not – many of the preppers I’ve spoken to are single dads, or primary caregivers for kids,” he says. “Their desire to keep their kids safe is one of the big motivators for their prepping behaviour; not the only motivation, but a big one. And, in fact, one prepper told me, ‘If I didn’t have kids, I wouldn’t bother with all this prepping stuff.’ ”

Doig says the movement isn’t just right-wing nuts hoarding guns; there are plenty of left-wingers, too, who view themselves as eco-preppers embracing the country lifestyle and growing organic produce. Unlike in New Zealand, where Doig sees preppers as more outdoor types who love camping, he thinks Australia is “further down the US-style rabbit hole” – that is, driven more about fear of the future and our inability to handle it. “Australian prepper culture is a faded, photocopied version of the US.”

Extremism can certainly lurk in the prepper world. Survivalist, former soldier and zombie film actor Aleziah Tolkien Spiers was sent to jail in late 2023 after police found a large arsenal of weapons, including machine guns, at his property in central Victoria. He’d told authorities the farm would be a great place to “bug out in the event of an apocalypse-type scenario”.

Aleziah Tolkien Spiers was jailed last year after a cache of weapons was found at his Victorian property.

Sometimes prepping can go horribly wrong. In July 2023, a family from Colorado was found dead and partially mummified after trying to live off-grid at a distant campsite in the Rocky Mountains. The coroner concluded they may have died from starvation and cold temperatures after initially living on soup, canned food and pre-packaged products. They had no survival experience and, according to a family member, had done research by watching YouTube videos.

A US survey last year, the Finder’s Consumer Confidence Index, reported that 74 million Americans were prepping for disaster, having spent $US11 billion in the previous year on emergency supplies including food, water, toilet paper, medical supplies and survival kits. According to a YouGov poll of Americans in late February 2020, as COVID-19 was starting to take off, 42 per cent of American adults believed that they would survive at least one week after the apocalypse. Far more men (49 per cent) than women (36 per cent) held this view. Nearly three in 10 American adults thought they would probably see an apocalyptic disaster in their lifetime.

For the billionaire class, buying and building secret getaways in remote corners of the globe sits alongside finding ways to prolong life and defy ageing as the solution. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have spent the past decade buying up huge amounts of land on the Hawaiian island of Kauai for a roughly 570-hectare compound, reportedly costing $US270 million, with a massive underground shelter. It’ll be self-sufficient, with its own water tank and food produced on the land. For convicted crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, his dream was to buy the Pacific island of Nauru. As part of the lawsuit against him, it was revealed he wanted a “bunker/shelter” there that would be used for “some event where 50 to 99.99 per cent of people die”.

The co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, told The New Yorker in 2017 that the prepper movement among tech-billionaires was, in the words of a friend, “apocalypse insurance”. He estimated that around half of the wealthiest Silicon Valley set had purchased such a property, New Zealand being a favoured destination.

And for those who are wealthy but not necessarily on a billionaire’s budget, there is the option of a luxe bunker. In the US, a European-based company called Oppidum offers “secure high-end underground living” alongside a person’s existing home. One model sells for $US40 million. The company’s website shows a mock-up of the bunker, more akin to a five-star hotel with “blast protection” in case of war or civil strife, and a commitment to insulate the client “from any and all physical dangers for as long as you need”. The Heritage model covers 1150 square metres with handcrafted glass chandeliers, fresh flowers from the indoor garden and optional extras including a swimming pool and staff quarters. These properties have been built in the US, Europe and across the globe. There are no known installations in Australia.

European firm Oppidum’s luxe bunker offers an indoor garden and an optional swimming pool.

In his compelling 2022 book, Survival of the Richest, the American writer Douglas Rushkoff argues the most privileged people on the planet don’t want to make the world a better place. Instead, extreme wealth “served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”

The more basic prepper industry appears to be doing well in Australia. Alan Wood is general manager of Perth’s Survival Supplies Australia. He estimates he’s had more than 100,000 customers over his shop’s 12-year life. About 40 per cent of his sales are for long-life food, with some products having a shelf life of up to 25 years. He sells frozen dried meat and vegetables along with bushcraft gear, knives and machetes. Each day he sells at least 10 “grab and go kits”, a bag of life-and-death essentials that enables people to survive for a few days. These cost as little as $140 but there are other, far more expensive options, including a gluten-free “mains and breakfast serving bucket
bundle” for $445. “The US prepper TV programs put out skewed images of preppers,” Wood tells me. “We work with very normal people, not the stereotypes like you see in the US. I don’t like the fear porn [on US shows].”

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Survivalists aren’t always men. Gina Chick won the SBS TV series Alone Australia in 2023 after spending 67 days alone in the Tasmanian wilderness. She preaches the benefits of time in nature, which helped her manage the crushing loss in 2013 of her daughter, Blaise, to cancer at the age of three. Chick, who has a memoir out later this year, prefers the term “rewilding” to prepping. “Rewilding is about this reverence of nature. Rewilding’s basic tenet is receptivity. Preppers aren’t rewilders. They’re holed up with their guns and not in harmony with nature.” She wants to represent the movement “as a stepping stone for city folk who don’t ever take their shoes off to the hardcore prepper”. For her, rewilding is central to living a centred and moral life. “It’s learning what our hunter-gatherer ancestors used to know,” she says.

Gina Chick, who won an SBS series after 67 days alone in the Tasmanian wilderness, prefers the term “rewilding” to prepping.Credit: SBS

Too often, Chick argues, prepping prioritises power over, rather than relationship with, nature. There must be a more matriarchal way of being. Chick, who leads courses for adults and children and has specialised in women-only retreats called Heart of the Huntress, wishes Australia had a stronger hunting culture, where the skills of camouflage and connection are rewarded. “It’s more Avatar than Apocalypse Now,” she says.

Those taking her courses are “regular people with two jobs, with kids in private and public schools, who are starting to ask questions and want to take steps to future-proof their families; if I can’t predict tomorrow, how can I protect my family?” The growing public appeal of preparing for uncertain times makes perfect sense to Chick. We’re in transition times. “The cracks are starting to show” on the systems that surround us. “Our society is organised on tomorrow looking like today. But it’s an illusion. Models of prediction go out of the window.”

When I ask Chick what she thinks may cause the tipping point, she cites space junk, a mini-tsunami, a cyber attack or displaced refugees (in the millions or billions). But amateurs be warned. “YouTube warriors will fall over in the first week; they don’t have the skills.”

‘Our society is organised on tomorrow looking like today. But it’s an illusion. Models of prediction go out of the window.’

Gina Chick

Although most preppers are reluctant to talk about their preparations for the end of the world, Paul Giannakis, who was doing Cassar’s bushcraft course when I visited, is different. Dressed in a rainbow T-shirt with a bum-bag around his blue jeans, the NSW schoolteacher and author of a book about essay writing for final-year school students grew up in South Africa, moving with his family to Australia in 1999 to escape the country’s instability. His first-hand glimpses of social chaos left their mark.

Paul Giannakis witnessed social collapse as a young child in South Africa.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“Part of the reason why I’m interested in being prepared now is because I watched a society’s systems collapse when I was quite young,” he says. Not unlike Cassar, Giannakis argues societal disintegration could be closer than we think. “Most people don’t really consider the gravity of this,” he contends, “but we’re really only a few weeks away from multitudes starving in Australia if the trucks lose their ability to transport goods from ports to supermarkets.”

Giannakis has educated himself on how to forage, purify water, skin an animal and create a warm shelter to avoid hypothermia. He obtained a gun licence in 2018 to hunt, though his aim is to “minimise as much animal suffering as possible”. His girlfriend, a “much more civilised person than me as her interests are going bushwalking and then heading back to a hotel”, struggles to understand why he’s taking so many outdoor and bushcraft classes.

‘People often die on a bed of food in the bush but they don’t know how to find it.’

Jake Cassar

Now in his mid-30s, Giannakis says he’s been transformed by his prepping, which he says has allowed him to “connect with the beautiful world around me in a meaningful way that isn’t just taking resources. I feel a real love and respect for plants and animals and feel honoured to be able to share spaces with them.”

Back at Mangrove Mountain, the echidna is ready to be eaten. Everyone’s excited to try something for the first time. Standing around the fireplace, the men devour every piece, careful to avoid the animal’s spines. The taste is a cross between lamb and pork, fatty and nourishing. “Absolutely bloody delicious,” declares Cassar. To his mind, being able to eat like this is just sensible. “There’s food everywhere,” he explains. “People often die on a bed of food in the bush but they don’t know how to find it.”

Having spent time with troubled youth, Cassar has a long-term vision: to work with more disadvantaged young people, engage in environmental activism and run tracking courses funded by his keynote presentations, weekend getaway events and team building exercises for corporate clients. He’s often engaged in searches in the bush for a lost person or animal.

During the recent search for missing Victorian woman Samantha Murphy, he assisted the local community in Ballarat. He wasn’t connected to the police operation, but some residents paid for his flight and accommodation for three days. His experience searching for a dozen or so missing people over the years, including young boy William Tyrrell in 2014, make him a man in demand. “I love my family, I love my community. I want to do everything I can to help others be prepared for the worst-case scenario.”

Cassar worries about the “resurgence” of divisions between “men and women, black and white, gay and straight, vax and anti-vax”. What he proposes is not obsessing on the “doom and gloom” but rather, sitting around a campfire, raising children in a culture of stories and sharing. “It’s time for people to just come together, get back to our roots and reconnect with each other in a real and tangible way.”

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