Led by Dr Tom Doig, the Preppers and Survivalism project is the result of a rapidly growing global sub-culture: Preppers. This project collates existing AustLit bibliographic records of Australian writing on preppers. Given its status as an emerging topic for writing in Australia, the project also includes prepper-adjacent works that function as important reference texts for prepper culture, centred around themes of survivalism and preparedness. This project provides the scaffolding for what is certain to be a growing area of research in the wake of an ever-worsening climate crisis and unstable world.
A 'prepper' can be defined as someone who expects to experience some form of major disruption – from a natural disaster to widespread societal collapse – within their lifetime, and who is taking active steps to prepare for that eventuality.
Searches for 'survivalist' or 'preppers' do not return many hits in the AustLit database. In fact, much of the discourse around prepping originates from the United States and the various textual and media depictions of prepper subculture from that region.
However, the concerns of survivalism and prepping can be seen everywhere in Australian writing, from narratives of climate collapse to Indigenous cultural survival to accounts of self-sufficiency and off-grid living. This project comprised the construction of a specialised dataset in the AustLit database on Australian stories about survivalism and prepping.
This project was the result of foundational work focused on identifying, updating and compiling records already within the AustLit database, developing dataset parameters, affiliating works into a searchable and discrete dataset, identifying future sources of data, and creating the Preppers project page.
In compiling and generating this new dataset, the aim is to provide a foundation for future scholars to gain an understanding of the role of prepping as an emerging subject in the Australian literary tradition alongside its close relationship to survivalism.
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