Assuming we are talking about a global incident of a permanent nature, that is, society as we know it is finished and no one is coming to fix it, there are two essential 'items' on my survival checklist .
That being : my dog and a horse, prefferably two or three horses, but at least one....a couple more dogs couldnt hurt either.
Eyes, ears, nose and feet...all way better than mine, all very usefull in the given situation.
With those, a weapon (a knife or even a razorblade will do just fine for starters) , and the clothes on my back, I am confident I could adapt to any situation which arose, and provide myself with the essentials for basic survival...food, water, clothing and shelter.
In a kill or be killed situation, or fight or flee, the dog and horses are invaluable, the dog for early warning/detection/tracking/hunting and the horses for running away or running down and carrying things.
Food in Australia is almost a non existant problem, there are a few thousand sheep and a couple of hundred head of cattle for every one person here at the moment, kill off a few million of those incapable of surviving and the ratio grows even more.
Then theres a few billion kangaroos and wallabies, birds, lizards, fish and all sorts of edible plants, including millions of acres of food crops like wheat, corn, sugar cane and fruit trees.
Sheep and cattle are not hard to hunt, they arent very intelligent, and they taste pretty good.They allso provide everything you need to make clothes, tents, shoes, rope, string, spear/arrow heads, bow strings, water containers, fish hooks, needles, spoons, forks, hair combs...the list is allmost endless.
Bone, meat, sinew, leather and hair or wool, all in one neat package.
A stout stick is weapon enough to bag yourself a sheep.
With a horse and a dog, cattle are easy pickings too.
Surviving would be easy, the hard part would be deciding if/whom to trust and cooperate with, or wether to just stay mobile and hidden and simply ignore them or prey on them.
Trust/cooperation being by far the more difficult and more likely to fail option of the three to my mind.
Wether to ignore other people or prey on them (ie steal food,goods and the occasional 18 year old daughter, not eat) would depend entirely on the prevailing situation and the actions of those other people.
I think that the same scenario would be vastly differant in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, mainly because there would be infinetly less people.
Theres only about 20 million here right now, and something like 96% of those people live in the urban centres.
Of those 20 million, I reckon a good 80 to 90 percent would be dead within a year or two, either from starvation, disease or civil war on an allmost tribal scale.
That would leave us with less than four or five million humans, who would no doubt still be concentrated around the decaying urban centres, or the surrounding farm and bushland.
The crops and livestock here, left unattended would multiply, or at the least continue to exist at something fairly close to their current numbers.
Wheat would seed and fall to the ground to grow again next year, fruit would do the same, cattle and sheep would easily adapt and survive.
Dealing with the basics of staying alive here on an ongoing basis would be easy, dealing with those few people who remained, and any society that they may have rebuilt or created would be the difficult and dangerous part.
I dont have a set plan, but I have the knowledge needed to keep myself alive long enough to make one each day as the situation unfolded.
I hope it turns out to be useless knowledge.
