Alone Australia winner takes home $250000 after 67 days: 'I was ...

When rewilding facilitator Gina Chick first arrived at her Alone Australia site, she took off her shoes to dance around on the moss. Many viewers (this one included) thought they had her pegged: filling the role of hippy comic relief in the inaugural local season of the beloved survival series.

Having broken the cardinal rule of reality TV – don’t read the comments – the 52-year-old was well aware of how her barefoot moss tango came across. “I had such a giggle at all the people who were like, ‘Oh my God, the hippy? She’s going to last a day!’” she says, laughing conspiratorially. For she knew the truth all along: she had won the $250,000 prize, having spent 67 days alone in the wilderness on the west coast of lutruwita/Tasmania.

Gina’s victory elevates her to rare company: she is one of only three female winners, with former contestant Woniya returning to win Alone: Frozen last year, and one woman winning the Danish spin-off. And as many viewers may have realised after watching her succeed again and again, episode after episode, there was a deep intent behind that dance: connection with the land. “I ran around for at least an hour, and that was my way of saying ‘hello’ to that landscape,” she says. “That was my way of saying to the land, ‘I’m here, and I want to dance with you.’”

After Michael tapped out on day 30, Gina and Mike were neck and neck for 34 more days. It was a fascinating battle of wits: would Mike’s hardcore survival skills and sheer bloodymindedness win out, or was it Gina’s to lose? Through it all, Mike’s tarp shelter began to seem bleaker, and Gina’s hut more cosy. When the Roaring Forties arrived in the final week and the wind shredded Mike’s tarps and collapsed his bed, Gina’s ramshackle hut stood firm.

Did constructing a home, not a shelter, make a difference to her psychologically? “This whole thing wasn’t a temporary thing where I was going to go and be ‘on the land’; for me it was about being one with the land,” she says. “If we don’t have a house, there’s a part of us that freaks out. Think about how you feel when you’re moving house. If we have a shelter that feels secure and cosy, like a home, there’s a huge part of our nervous system that down regulates and therefore doesn’t burn as many calories. And also, has that feeling of, ‘I could be here forever because I am so comfortable’, which is kind of how I felt.”

Committed Alone-philes have been impressed that Alone Australia emphasised First Nations knowledge in both the show’s pop-up facts, and in its production practices, with palawa consultants employed throughout the making of the season. Gina is effusive with gratitude for them.

“I absolutely know in my heart that if that hadn’t been part of the Alone offering, I don’t know how any of us would have done. I really felt like the palawa were with me and that I was there by their grace,” she says. “They gave us so much of their wisdom, they welcomed us to country. They didn’t give us all of the information, but just enough of a taste of it that we could learn by experience and find it out by ourselves.”

All of Alone’s greatest contestants give something of themselves to viewers; we come for the cool wilderness tricks, and stay for the psychological journeys. Gina’s legacy will surely be her remarkable openness, particularly in sharing stories about the death of her daughter, Blaise, who died aged three of cancer.

The depth of feeling that solitude opened up in her was a surprise even to Gina.

“I’ve been doing that for 30 years or so, and it’s part of what I do in my job, too: I hold space for people to go into their emotions. I have mapped those landscapes so thoroughly, it’s rare that there’s a surprise in there, so it was beautiful to have a few,” she says. “The first one was where I realised I needed people, and that since Blaise died, I’d kept a little part of myself separate to avoid the fear of losing someone else. The other part took 66 days.”

As it turned out, what Gina needed was a solid week of rain that trapped her inside her shelter; lutruwita provided a deluge, and then some. “I’m one of those people who can’t have sheets tucked in, I don’t wear shoes or underwear, I don’t have a job or a boss: I’ve managed to create a life where I don’t get ‘contained’. So when I was in this small shelter for a week, I got squeezed into that ‘trapped-ness’, and I metabolised it to the point where on the very last day I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t feel trapped, I’m just here’. By staying with that feeling, I dissolved it to now be in a very different place in my life. And then the next day the sun came out and they were like, ‘You can go home now!’ I was like, no, no, no! I’m just getting started!”

Gina’s warmth and wisdom is intoxicating; a glance at the clock reveals that in 15 minutes we’ve covered enough territory for four articles of this length. By way of a farewell, I ask what advice she’d give to anyone thinking of signing up for future seasons of Alone Australia.

“There’s nothing that will prepare you like experience,” she says. “Go outside, go spend days in the wilderness – and I mean days – with a tiny little tarp and a sleeping bag and some fishing hooks. Spend three days beside a river with no food and see what that feels like, so that by the time you go and apply, you’ve got some wisdom in your body. We very rarely put ourselves into discomfort: we’re pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding, meaning-making machines. To deliberately lean into the sharp places, that is the best training. Not just for Alone, but for a life of resilience and the ability to connect with the wilderness, inside and out.”

The first season of Alone Australia is available to stream in full on SBS On Demand. A second season is in production