Gina Chick has become an inspirational figure for post-menopausal women since winning the first season of hit survival series Alone Australia. Makeup by Justine Conroy. Photo / Michael Craig
Gina Chick has become an inspirational figure for post-menopausal women since winning the first season of hit survival series Alone Australia. Makeup by Justine Conroy. Photo / Michael Craig
If she’s ever on a plane that crashes in the Andes, Joanna Wane knows who she’d want to have right by her side.
Everyone who’s watched the extreme survival series Alone Australia has their favourite Gina Chick moment.
How she danced on the moss in bare feet and introduced herselfto the trees after being dropped on to an isolated, godforsaken stretch of Tasmania’s west coast. Her revelation that she doesn’t wear knickers.
Day 34, when she jumped a wallaby and “donked” it after getting up for a moonlight pee, apologising for taking the animal’s life and stroking its still-warm fur before expertly butchering the carcass.
The daily encounters with a platypus she filmed splashing around in the water by her bush shelter. The tears she cried on the birthday of her tousle-haired daughter Blaise, remembering the “little chick” who died of cancer in 2013 at the age of 3.
Gina Chick's daughter, Blaise, was 3 when she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that most commonly affects young children. "Our one perfect cub flew away."
Then, finally, the moment on day 67 when she turned to see Blaise’s father, Lee Trew, walking towards her from the bush.
“I spent about five minutes just barely touching his chest, because I felt like he was a hologram and my fingers were going to go right through him,” she tells me during a brief trip to Auckland to promote her new memoir We Are The Stars.
“There was an avalanche of realising I’d won, and then underneath that was, ‘Bugger, I wanted to go 90 days and I still have three weeks worth of food’. So I fed him lunch.”
It’s almost exactly two years since Chick was brought in from the cold, after outlasting nine other contestants who’d chosen to “tap out” or been evacuated due to injury or for failing a medical check.
The conditions were so brutal and the environment so stark that a key concern was the potentially life-threatening effects of malnutrition.
Among her rivals for the $250,000 prize in the first season of the smash-hit SBS show were a hunting guide, an army veteran who’d served in Iraq, a wildlife biologist, a solo adventurist, a school teacher and a vet.
Separated by impassable terrain, each of them carried 70kg of camera gear to self-document their attempts to survive in an eerily silent, rain-soaked landscape as winter approached. After 12 days, only four were left.
Chick - who runs survival quests and “Rewild Your Child” camps in New South Wales - was only the second woman worldwide to win Alone, which premiered in the US in 2015 and has since gone global. Aged 52, she was also the oldest.
As a psychological study, the programme makes for a fascinating watch. There’s a kind of paralysis called “drop shock” that people experience when they’re left alone in the wilderness and hear the last of humanity fade into silence, says Chick.
Gina Chick in the coat she'd made from 40 possum pelts and used as a sleeping bag, sewing herself into it at night. Photo / Narelle Portanier
Rather than trying to dominate nature with the force of her will, as the male contestants typically did, she simply softened into it.
“Country, for me, isn’t something I am apart from, I’m part of it. So to be in new country, the most important thing before anything else is to say hello and connect with this place that is going to be my home,” says Chick, who slowly fell in love with its harsh beauty.
“When the dancing on the moss [episode] screened, everyone thought, ‘Oh, my God, the weird hippie’. But afterwards, they were like, ‘Wow, that was the moment’.”
We Are The Stars: A misfit’s story
You won’t find any behind-the-scenes scandals from Alone Australia in Chick’s memoir, which ends two years before her primetime debut. A sequel is on the way, but a novel and an album of original songs she recorded during lockdown might come out first.
We Are The Stars is a vividly told account of a life with more than its share of heartbreak and trauma, from the con-man lover who faked a brain tumour and left her with a debt that took years of grind to pay off to the devastating loss of Blaise.
Chick’s earthy, unflinching, open-heartedness remains undiminished, despite all the crap that’s been thrown at her. In a particularly cruel twist of fate, she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer early in the pregnancy and advised to have a termination.
Instead, as her condition deteriorated, she agreed to have three months of chemotherapy with drugs she’d researched extensively for their safety in pregnancy. She went into remission, and the birth of a perfect baby girl and their precious few years together is a particularly joyous part of the book.
The loss of her daughter was almost unbearable but her life was a gift, Gina Chick writes in her memoir We Are The Stars. "I give Blaise from my heart to the void, from my belly to the world, from my eye to the sun."
Five harrowing miscarriages followed in the year after Blaise’s death and the couple eventually separated. Trew, who she met at Tracker School, remains a close friend and business partner. He’s now remarried, and it tells you everything you need to know about Chick that she’s godmother to his two young children.
Her own childhood was “a chaotic explosion of life and animals and camping trips and picnics and books and music and love”. But her memoir is described as a misfit’s story: social interactions often baffled her and school was a “grey interminable hell”. At one stage, her mother raises the possibility Chick is on the autism spectrum, although she’s never officially diagnosed.
“I was always very aware that I didn’t want to change to fit in and I’m so glad my family’s a bit bonkers,” she says. “If they’d been conventional, they would have tried to make me conventional and that wouldn’t have worked.
“I’ve just had to learn how to be with all of my neurodiversity, and I’ve ‘hacked human’ enough to be able to find my way in the world.”
Now somewhat of a celebrity in Australia, Chick has become an inspirational figure for post-menopausal women, with her “chunky arse” and the silver feathers in her hair. She still goes barefoot on the red carpet and TV chat shows - what she’s done with the prize money, she says, is nobody’s business but her own.
A second season of Alone Australia, filmed in Fiordland, went to air this year. Chick co-hosted a podcast reviewing each episode and the magnificence of the location left her incensed.
“Every week, I’d be shouting at the telly, ‘Look at the size of your fish! Look at your view!’ My eyeballs were dying with beauty. But then there were the sandflies ... I wasn’t jealous of those.”
We Are the Stars, by Alone Australia winner and rewilding expert Gina Chick (Simon & Schuster AU, $41.99).
We Are the Stars by Gina Chick (Simon & Schuster AU, $41.99) is out now. Both seasons of Alone Australia can be streamed on TVNZ+.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning feature writer on the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
