Making Charcoal [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The minimal editing, the close-ups to the camera when technical decisions happen and his absolute selfless-ness give it a very pure tone. You can tell he knows what he is doing, and has done research, but this is just you witnessing a hobby that needs not to be sold or advertised — just enjoyed.
If you liked those, try to get your hands on Dersu Uzala: it’s a Soviet-Japanese movie from 1975 (I know…) that has hours of forest scenes with the same peacefulness and purpose.
However, I don't think he'll find copper and tin ores in the same place, and trading stuff kinda ruins the entire premise of the project. So he'll have to get right to steelmaking, skipping bronze.
First, he'll have to obtain iron ore (since he's in Australia, it will be easy enough). Then, he needs coke — he can make it from charcoal by using beehive oven: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_oven
Then, he can build bloomery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) to produce sponge iron, and then wrought iron.
Then, cementation furnace (much harder to build) to make steel.
He makes a lot of stuff from scratch. He successfully makes gunpowder from manure and refines gold chemically.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=638073
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/printthread.php?t=638073...
To get a civilization that could support even a modest town large enough to support small mining operations and general trade you need the most important technology we've spent the past 10.000-40.000 years developing and which I don't see any technological shortcut to: The potato, banana, the chicken, the cow, etc. Superfoods, without which a civilization won't get very far and which will definitely not just exist on a planet that's never seen human cultivation.
(There's a fun survivorman episode where he gets dropped in a jungle, and after a day or two of hardship he stumbles upon an abandoned farm, instantly the whole 'surviving' aspect is gone and the rest of the episode is about him trying to live comfortably (i.e. not being eaten by ants at night), the difference between a bleeding edge modern mango and sucking on a wild berry is stark (the episode is called "Grenada Jungle"))
ps: random collision, I was just watching this http://typotalks.com/berlin/2012/speakers/single-speaker/?ti... when I realized it's similar to your vanished survivor mindset.
He also gave a Google talk a while back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdRV8ccyEE0
ps: his fire starting example reminded me of this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEl-Y1NvBVI (no supermarket involved though)
To further convince anyone reading this: He has videos on making huts, axes, drills, baskets, and more, all completely from scratch and all with (to my taste, at least) extremely good, no wasted time editing.
Well worth your hour to watch them all.
In the last couple of years I have gotten hard core into Kamado BBQing/smoking and one of the challenges is getting really good charcoal (there is also huge argument to the degree of how much this really matters ala audiophiles on wires but most say it does matter).