Very much a work in progress, and seeing as I won't be doing anything concrete until 2009 or 2010, it's bound to change.

My criteria are:

Australia (because it has very fault lines, volcanoes, nukes)
Australia (because a continent means one can always relocate to a better environment)
Australia (because it's where I live)
Australia (because any survivors are more likely to be civil than many other countries)

Inland and high up - in case of tsunamis

Not too close to Sydney, because it has a little nuclear reactor, used for sterilising medical equipment etc

Near to Melbourne, and near a train line, and near a reasonable-sized town (because I want to make it easy on myself, so it actually gets done)

I'm leaning towards the hills south-east of Albury, NSW (has a twin town over the border in Victoria called Wodonga). The town is a good-size of 80,000 people (so any supplies and contractors are available), is a transport hub (road and rail). It is 325kms inland, and there are mountains nearby, if we need to flee higher...

Map of Australia showing regions 600m above sea-level:
http://www.ga.gov.au/education/facts/images/relief.gif
(Albury is near the bottom, just above Melbourne)

Google Maps showing the terrain around Albury:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?ie=UTF8& ... 49&t=p&z=8

Cheap land is the plan, with exisiting buildings, quality doesn't matter.

Unfortunately the land around there isn't cheap like in the desert, so it might take several years to find the right kind of bargain...

(if this ends up being my survival spot, that's the most I'll give away online in terms of location)

Interesting musings Rob... agree with your criteria.

Inland mountains sound good. I was thinking Blue mountains but too far from Melb to be practical. And probably too close to Sydney with Lucas Heights...

I honestly don't get people's security with mountains, yes they provide elevation but they are generally suceptable to earthquakes and are generally near falt lines. I know Lake Ontario which is roughly where I am located used to be much bigger, streching far up the city of Toronto. My best bet is possibly the Canadian shield, thankfully my grandmother owns a vacant lot in this vacinity of the Canadian shield. Hopefully I can build myself a bunker there by 2012. I feel whatever happens 2012 it will not come instantly so I figure even if I started building sometime during 2012 it would be ready for when all hell would break loose.

The Cataclysms have happened before it's in the records, if you look at a lot of the stories. You will find over and over that people in the mountains survived to tell the tale of survival. Read the old stories look up the so called myths they are eyewitness accounts of major cataclysms. They are the stories of the survivors read where they survived from, the majority I have run across indicate survival in the mountains. Being alone in a bunker means you die alone in a bunker. Gangs will come and root you out. A community of people will be your best bet for survival.

Just came across some maps showing the parts of Oz that get bushfires, cyclones and earthquakes:
http://www.aussurvivalist.com/safestplaces.htm

google search - pendle hill
thats my best bet haha im screwed

Pendle hill? So if you survive all this then you'll be haunted to death

The only thing with a mountain is that you are xposed. Radiation might be a bit of a problem. So I bring UV protection.

A community of people will be your best bet for dating and singles matches. A community of people during a major disaster will leave you at the mercy of that community. More than 12 people in a truly large scale disaster is insane and just begging for internal conflict.

Hippie herbal communities from the 1960s onward tend to end in violent death, ostracism, theft and authority conflicts leaving people with nothing but the clothes on their back if they are lucky when it falls apart. This is during peacetime with a stable society. Imagine what these Foxfire-reading leftist nuts will do when TSHTF.

Communities are for people who are not very resourceful as individuals or small clans and have decided they'd rather die in company instead of alone.

NSW is so culturally divided a massive wave of foreigners is guaranteed to flow from the cities to the countryside, nuclear reactor aside. NSW is a good place to end up as BBQ. Sydney itself is one of the filthiest criminal hellholes on Earth. It looks like ass and smells worse. Like Thailand with better street wiring. Best strategy is to probably surrender to Chinese invasion force as half of them are already in place.

Melbourne is a deathtrap for much the same reasons. It's also assured to starve/freeze during an extended winter. Supply lines are easily broken and it is at just the right density for maximum chaos and anarchy.

The Gold Coast doesn't have the most charming people but nearly everything else is perfect. I could list a thousand of it's virtues as a survivalist mecca but the most obvious is that no tidal wave has ever or will ever get far across the shallow Barrier Reef. Never. Tectonic activity - zero. High ground and warm enough to grow stuff in the summer when the sun comes back. The Gold Coast is the perfect place and that's why I relocated there.

I'm not going to try and predict the aftermath of a 2012 event, when I have no certainty of what will occur.

But it seems very clear to me, that to cover all possibilities as efficiently as possible, being inland, up high, away from others (especially major cities)...

...in a country with decent people, only one tiny nuke, few earthquakes and diseases, will be best.

In a bunker.

I'm pretty committed to putting things back together. There are different phases to this situation and each phase calls for different correct responses. An ever expanding community is the quickest way back.

.. or consider that there are no historical examples of civilization being established by anything other than brute force and raw barbaric inhumanity, making the small remote isolated groups the smartest game in town. Your vision of a sprawling metropolis of happy cooporative well-wishing crystal-rubbing Aquarians stands in diametric opposition to the rude camp of fractured and competing ethnic minorities who now constitute the Western world. The only thing keeping those groups from asserting their own preferred cultural regime as a homogenous group is a strong central secular government forcing them to pretend to like each other. As soon as any disaster strikes the West, it will be plunged into a horrible series of ugly ethnic civil wars until one or more groups establishes their own value system again on the local territory, usually on a mound of human skulls. No Foxfire chapters on canning your own peaches need be consulted during this transitional period.

As following the collapse of the Roman Empire, all the smart money was in remote heavily defended farms isolated from the urban regions, where naked ethnic and racial hatreds played themselves out in grotesque orgies of rape, mutilation, torture and execution. Hippie herbal types who chose to remain behind and educate the masses in the need for sacrifice for the common good generally ended up anally impaled and roasted over an open fire after the Roman Empire fell.

I'd also like to point out that whenever any puny human tells you he is mainly concerned with saving the world, you will soon discover he isn't even capable of saving himself. Kind of like politicians who promise to restore the family when their own children have committed suicide and they are working on their third divorce.

My best guess is cells of up to 50 people, spread out over a continent, with the ability to maintain contact (might only require a crank shortwave radio), and come to each others aid if need be, but otherwise lie low and get their location safe and seld-sufficent.

Autonomous cells with the same desires seems to work well for terrorists (well, those on 24 anyway), so it could work for us as well.

This is exactly correct. History bears witness to the effectiveness of this strategy.

Small groups spread out, interconnected by some form of rapid communication, able to come to the aid of others when necessary or share and barter goods and services when it is in everybody's mutual interest. No one group lacks self-sufficiency, so nobody is dependent on another and none has to gain their survival by attacking somebody else.

Referring again to the collapse of the Roman Empire, although all the smart survivors were in the countryside in small bands, nearly any farm would come to the aid of another when it was under attack and many kinds of defensive actions were collaborative to protect all the farm fortresses involved. These people prospered and survived whilst in the cities, it was babies - the other white meat.