Survival Skills & Knowledge

Children who have practised something act; children who have only been warned freeze. Here is what to teach at each age, framed as competence rather than catastrophe.

Nobody has a first aid kit at the moment they need one. Here is what a car already contains that does the job — and the two things you should never improvise.

Camp knife and axe injuries are boringly predictable: the same three cuts, in the same three places. Here are the rules that prevent each of them, and what to do when one happens anyway.

Most people know one knot and use it for everything. Seven knots cover almost every real task, and two of the knots people rely on most are the ones causing the failures.

Australia is a bad place to forage and a worse place to guess. Here is the short list of plants worth knowing, the ones that kill, and why calories spent looking are usually calories lost.

The rule of threes is the best triage tool in survival and the most misquoted. Here is what it gets right, the four situations where it will get you killed, and the correction that actually…

The Hollywood version of an emergency is panic. The real version is people standing still, doing very little, for far too long — and that is the response worth training against.

Bystander CPR is the single highest-impact skill on this site, and the thing that stops people is not technique — it is hesitation. Here are the numbers and permission to act.

The treatment for a burn is the kitchen tap, for twenty minutes, and it still helps hours later. Everything people reach for instead — ice, butter, creams — makes it worse.