The Doomsday Clock, used by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for the last 70 years to indicate the danger level of global nuclear annihilation, was recently moved to “two-and-a-half minutes to midnight”.

On an Aboriginal timeline, we might recall much older lore about uranium, which warns of a monster that must be left in the ground or it will destroy the earth with fire; or the blue tongue lizard Dreaming story warning about radioactive poison.

Indigenous reasoning does not tolerate isolated variables, so from an Aboriginal perspective you can’t ignore the interconnected issues. The threat of nuclear apocalypse is occurring during the greatest species extinction event in aeons. Rare earth metal refining – for the solar panels we all put our hopes in – produces tons of radioactive waste that can’t be safely stored. The disaster site at Fukushima continues to leak. Nuclear-armed developing nations in South Asia are running out of water. Developed nations globally are running out of topsoil. And the broader impacts of climate change are already being felt.

Moira J. (@moira__j) When people wonder what the post-apocalypse world will look like, just ask an Indigenous person, we survived and have been living in it.

Johnnie Jae (@johnniejae) I'm very fond of saying that as Indigenous people "Survival is our Superpower". We have survived the apocalypse of colonization & genocide.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of the world. It seems many Indigenous people have. The theme has become prolific in First Nations art, literature, film and television. Search online and you can find hundreds of tweets and blogs about it, with a common theme: a confidence that we’ll be the only ones to survive.

In bookstores I found Indigenous speculative fiction novels like the dystopian futurist works of Sam Watson and Alexis Wright, and the adolescent fiction of Palyku writer Ambelin Kwaymullina, creator of the Tribe trilogy – Australia’s answer to the Hunger Games. The TV series Cleverman, produced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, offered up a futuristic black superhero to make me feel like I would outlast the Doomsday Clock.

We need more Aboriginal superheroes, so I created Cleverman for my son Read more

Dr Duane Hamacher from Monash University has spent years studying ancient oral histories of geological events. “For over 65,000 years, the First Peoples of this continent have experienced major catastrophes,” he tells me. “These have included volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, meteorite impacts and rapid sea level rises. The people survived, and so did the stories.”

Hamacher attributes this survival to the immense complexity and adaptive capacity of First Nations cultures. But does this resilience in the face of natural disasters characterise Indigenous responses to colonisation as well?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The people survived, and so did their stories,’ says Dr Duane Hamacher. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP

Last week I went to a Melbourne Fringe festival event: a First Nations response to the end of the world that took the form of an art party called Apocalypse in Blak.

Created by Nayuka Gorrie and the Koori Heritage Trust, the show explored cycles of adaptation beyond the Anthropocene era in dance and electronic sound pieces. It was interspersed with spoken word and free-for-all audience participation – with a bratty “whatever” mood throughout.

Colonisation was our apocalypse, and we are already living in a dystopian future, so we are ahead of the game. Nayuka Gorrie, artist and commentator

“Colonisation was our apocalypse, and we are already living in a dystopian future, so we are ahead of the game,” Gorrie says. “Part of me is excited about what comes next as an opportunity to take my country back, a chance to assert sovereignty.”

Then she goes for the jugular with a cheeky byte that will likely see her inbox filled with hate mail: “Colonists are about to experience their own apocalypse, but whose land can they steal next to survive it?”

Dr Larry Gross is chair of Native American Studies at the University of Redlands in California. An Anishinaabe man of the Minnesota Chippewa, Gross has published and spoken extensively on a theory he coined, called post-apocalyptic stress syndrome (Pass). He defines it as: “When a culture experiences such a massive shock that it never fully recovers.”

Gross has identified this syndrome in both Indigenous and settler communities. Recent examples include white manufacturing workers in the American mid-west, whose way of life came to an end with the collapse of their industry. Historically, he finds the same indicators of Pass in population data from Europe after the Black Death plagues in the 14th century.

“The Europe that came out of the Black Death was not the same as the Europe that went in,” Gross tells me. He draws parallels between this event, and the Indigenous experience of colonisation. “Both resulted in an intergenerational pandemic of post traumatic stress disorder, suicide and widespread substance abuse.”

Gross sees potential apocalyptic crises today as opportunities for reconciliation, drawing from his study of historical Indigenous and European holocausts: “Since the Europeans went through an apocalypse and suffered the exact same symptoms as Indigenous people, this indicates that we are not as different as we might like to think.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cleverman featured a futuristic black superhero. Photograph: Lisa Tomasetti / press

Melbourne’s West Space Gallery is currently hosting Every Second Feels Like a Century, a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators Hannah Presley and Debbie Pryor. In a determined “race against destruction”, the exhibit litters a small gallery space with stylised doomsday prepper kits, crystallised fossil replicas of Coke bottles and Nikes, and traditional tools alongside urban foraging equipment.

Tasmanian Indigenous artist Nicholas Hovington presents a resurrective shrine of skin and bones – a grisly homage to a time when the bounty for shooting thylacines was the same as for shooting Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Star Dreaming and Turtle lore are flagged for a revival, to bring on a cataclysm described cryptically by Worimi artist Adam Ridgeway as “good hurt now, big debt one”. There are complex layers to this exhibit that are worth unpacking.

Presley recounts the impact the stolen generation had on her family, and how it influenced her approach to the exhibit. “I thought about my own grandfather, whose mother rubbed him with charcoal to keep him with her,” she told me. “That moment he was stolen could be interpreted as an apocalypse for our family.” She incorporated the same colour of charcoal into the exhibition design.

According to Gross, it takes at least a century for a population to adapt after post-apocalyptic stress syndrome. In the meantime there is an understandable need to express both mourning and bravado in response to world-changing events. You can see it as a therapeutic way of coming to grips with past trauma without drowning in victimhood and despair in the present.

If you can’t remember what wattles indicate about the fish in the river, then you’re going to have a bad apocalypse

But while assertions of Indigenous peoples’ end-times advantage are often delivered with an empowering kind of smugness, it’s not always justified. In my case particularly, it’s been almost a year since I ate dugong or used a spear, and city living in that time has made my feet as soft as my rapidly-expanding buttocks. I doubt my capacity to hunt escaped pets for meat, or fight off mutants after the bomb drops. No matter what your tribe is, if you haven’t noticed the wattle flowering in this season or can’t remember what that indicates about the fish in the river, then you’re going to have a bad apocalypse.

Many of our people might struggle with the lack of vegan options available in post-nuclear urban foraging, or with the disturbing realisation that being black, proud and fabulous doesn’t make you any better qualified to knock a zombie’s brains out with a boomerang.

Most of us, regardless of ethnicity, will probably be in the same boat when it comes to the end of the world.