Gina Chick was the last one standing at the end of the first season of Alone Australia.
It was a remarkable feat. Alone for 67 days in the Tasmanian wilderness in the middle of winter with 10 basic survival items and a camera to film her experiences.
Hungry. Lonely. Cold. Exhausted.
The experience changed Gina's life.
The $250,000 in prize money she won no doubt came in handy, but it's the doors that were opened to her that she is most grateful for.
"Coming into this experience, I said the Gina who walked in would not be the Gina that walked out ... What I've found is that I can let my instincts and the land teach me what I needed to know. I really wanted to show that there is a way of being at home in the wild," she told SBS Australia after her win.
Today Gina is a powerful public speaker, a singer and songwriter, teaches dance meditation classes, hosts "rewilding" retreats where people are encouraged to reconnect with nature, is a television presenter, a podcaster and a talented writer with an exquisite turn of phrase that borders on poetic.
She's working on her memoir, We Are The Stars, in publisher Simon & Schuster's Sydney office when Weekender calls. It's due for release on October 2.
"I am surrounded by photos of my life at the moment," Gina says.
"I am looking at all of these amazing shots from the '90s in queer Sydney, I'm looking at photos of my childhood ... and I'm having to choose 60 out of about 200 for my book.
"I'm so pleased to be able to express my grandmother's [writer Charmian Clift] genes and to tell a story that hopefully people will relate to on a deeper level of real."
Gina, an open book, was unapologetically herself on Alone Australia. In your face, warts and all. Singing to a platypus, dancing on mossy ground and luring fish from the water through dance endeared her to viewers and, in turn, television producers.
Her heartbreaking vulnerability and her inspiring strength, captured by Australian Story in August 2023 when she spoke about "dancing with grief" after losing her three-year-old daughter Blaise to cancer, touched the hearts of thousands more.
Offers started to roll in.
Gina is one of three presenters on series two of Great Australian Walks which premieres on SBS and SBS On Demand on August 22. The first series was hosted by Julia Zemiro and was a ratings success. The second series sees the hosting duties shared between Zemiro, Gina and actor and comedian Susie Youssef.
Gina had no television or presenting experience prior to Great Australian Walks but is a natural. She's relaxed in front of the camera and sounds genuinely interested in learning about the places she visits.
"I am absolutely crap at faking anything, I am the world's worst actor. I cannot act to save my life," Gina says.
"I can play myself. I can do me, that's fine, but I can't pretend to be anyone or anything else.
"So the presenting thing was a really interesting ride because I had to learn these skills. It's one thing to be on Alone Australia and put up these cameras, but there were no cameramen attached to them."
Gina loves to learn. Her mind is a sponge, eager to soak up new information, skills and experiences.
"I figure you only get one crack at life, so you might as well have a good crack at it," she says.
"I really enjoyed learning the technical skills of presenting and the show was the most amazing place for me to start in formal presenting mode because it is so beautifully slow. It is so real.
"I got to do these walks barefoot; there was no occupational health and safety person telling me to put my shoes on."
Sand, soil or asphalt, Gina does it all barefoot. She joyfully kicks her shoes off at the start of the Newcastle episode of Great Australian Walks I watched that screens later this year (October 17). You feel as though you are walking with her, enjoying a casual and entirely effortless conversation.
"There's so much that isn't real in the media, so to have someone on television pretty much say stuff it, this is the way I am, that realness resonates with people," Gina says.
Another door that opened for her as a result of Alone Australia resulted in Gina hosting Alone Australia: The Podcast with SBS News presenter Darren Mara earlier this year.
"I'd never done a podcast before so I had to learn about that, and I loved it, and then there's my book coming out in October which is going to be epic," she says.
"I'm 55 and I'm getting to learn all these new things thanks to Alone and I think that is one of the things I am so grateful for about this whole process. I've been able to accept the opportunities and the challenges."
Down to Earth
Gina spent her childhood years at Jervis Bay on the south coast of NSW, exposed at an early age to Australia's rugged natural beauty. She reckons it's "woven into her DNA".
"My parents were both teachers which meant we had weekends school holidays together as a family," she says.
"We didn't have much money so it's not like we could go on skiing holidays, or to Europe, but what we did do is go camping and bushwalking.
"I think that the nature connection and my love of walking is so woven into my childhood and my DNA that I actually can't remember not having it as a part of my life."
Throughout her life Gina has used nature to ground herself, as a way to find clarity and meaning. She finds the chaos of modern life stifling in more ways than one.
"For me nature is the difference between feeling caged and feeling free," she says.
"When I am out in nature and I can take off my shoes and lean against a tree and look at the horizon, and I can feel the sun against my skin and hear the birds ... When I'm outside of walls I have a better understanding of who I am and who I am in relation to this interconnected web of life.
"I don't feel alone, I feel like I am a part of this beautiful living breathing planet, and I understand myself."
If she's "within walls" for too long she "starts to get a bit twitchy".
"I love the benefits, don't get me wrong, I love all of it, but I need to see and smell the ocean, I need to have bare feet, I need to sleep next to a fire, I need to be able to put down the phone and stop doom scrolling," Gina says.
"I need to do all of those things to regulate my nervous system, and I find that when I do that, even in a small way, even if it's for five minutes, something happens.
"This weight falls off me and I come home to myself."
Alone and lonely
That's not to say nature has always been kind. A skilled survivalist she may be, but Gina took some time to find her feet when "dropped" into the wilderness by the Alone Australia crew.
"The first two days threw me. It's called drop shock," she explains.
"It's basically going from putting 20 kilos on before the show, going up to the cake shop and ordering seven Portuguese tarts and three croissants to put on enough weight, to going in with this plan and all these ideas, to then be dropped into this environment.
"I thought I was going to be dropped near this lovely clear stream reflecting snow-capped mountains and instead I got this mudscape of dead trees.
"I was overwhelmed. There was too much information coming in and everything gets paralysed, which is why it's called drop shock."
Gina spent two days in this state. Then she took off her shoes.
"As soon as I danced in the moss with my bare feet everything started to change, I was like 'OK, I can do this. I'm here. It's weird and it's wild and it's beautiful and it's ugly and it's gritty and it's grimy and it's muddy and it's amazing'. And then every day after that I would just solve the challenges that were in front of me on that day.
"So I wasn't really thinking about the next day or how many days I had left, or who was left, I was just getting up every day and going 'What's today got? Oh, OK, here we go!'."
Alone Australia was SBS's highest rating series to date in 2023 and its most successful ever original commission.
Back to basics
Pondering my own chances of survival if "dropped" into the wilderness, and feeling alarmed at the mere thought, I tell Gina I would not be up to the task. The words "inadequate" and "pathetic" might have been used. Gina rushes to my defence.
"No, no, can I just challenge you on that Lisa, because I don't think it's pathetic at all. I think that we, as modern humans, have been taken away from the way of learning that would mean that you are at home in the wild," she says.
"The vast majority of our DNA is from our hunter-gatherer ancestors and that information is there, but unless we're given opportunities to learn how to live like that, or to solve challenges in that way, it is scary."
I agree. But Gina isn't finished just yet.
""It's a normal human impulse that when we can't predict something, to be afraid of it. To judge ourselves for it is not useful," she continues.
"That information and that wisdom is inside you. How to express it? It might just be that you take your shoes off for three minutes on the grass, that's a step. We can't do it all at once."
Gina's commitment to "rewilding" at retreats and solo bush vigils held on the south coast of NSW helps people to tap into this wisdom by learning to be at home in the wild and identifying how the landscape can meet their needs.
It's about connecting to the living planet and finding peace inside while being at one with the wilderness outside.
"We all have your strengths, we all have our gifts, we all have something that we can do. It just so happens that the thing that I do is a little bit unusual," she says.
"We've all got our wisdom to bring. You've got yours and I've got mine. They're just different."
