Gina Chick has been through some "pretty massive things" in her life.
Many people may know Chick for being the first ever winner of the survival reality TV show Alone Australia, but her life story is full of dips and turns that started long before she ever went on the competition.
She has just published a memoir called We Are The Stars where she traces her childhood as a self-described strange child who was extremely in tune with nature, as well as the heartbreak and tragedy in the years that followed.
In her 20s she fell in love with a con man, she told Mihingarangi Forbes on Saturday Morning.
"I was the prey that went out to the wolf and went, 'hello, Wolfie, you look fun'."
That relationship crashed her life, she said.
"Completely 100 percent bankrupted myself, almost lost my life in the process."
It was, however, when she grew up, she said.
"That period was when baby Gina died, and wise Gina started to emerge."
The relationship left her in massive debt, and she had to work out how to rebuild her life.
"I was very analytical. I've been trained at university to be a journalist, in PR, in advertising. Could I do that? And that was such a no, that lifestyle, especially then, was a no.
"And then it was like, well, 'could I do crime? Is that something that I could do?' My heart wouldn't let me do it. I couldn't live with myself with those decisions. But it was a real question. Could I do that?
"And then I remember looking at my hands and they're big hands and they're strong hands and they're intelligent hands. And I was already working in five-star hotels, a couple of shifts a week, doing massage... I can remember just looking at them going, 'Oh, these hands are smarter than I am. This is my way through'."
She set to work building a business, she said.
"I just worked and worked 6.30am till 11pm, six days a week."
But a simpler, more wholesome life was calling, she said.
"I had a surgical event that nearly killed me, and in the aftermath of that I knew I had to get away from Oxford Street. I had to get away from that lifestyle. I had to get away from the unconsciousness of that. I had to get away from drugs. I had just had to get away from everything.
"And I ended up on an island in far north Queensland, working harder than I've ever worked in my life, it was chop wood, carry water. It was so simple."
It was a "reawakening of something", she said.
"I'd gone so far into this inner city, strange lifestyle of nightclubs and darkness, to then break that and emerge with a whole bunch of wounds and a whole bunch of scars, but to let the wilderness heal me, I completely saw everything with brand new eyes and wonder and love and gratitude."
Adventurer and author Gina Chick. Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
In her late 30s she heard about a school in the US called Tom Brown JR's Tracker School.
"It was this school based on the teachings of an Apache, he was called grandfather, and he had taught this redneck kid named Tom Brown everything he knew.
"And then Tom ended up starting this school in New Jersey, teaching the primitive survival skills, ancestral survival skills. I just had to go, so I just packed myself up, and off I went."
She met the man who would become her partner there - Lee. She took him home to meet the family in Sydney.
"I brought him home, as I used to say to my friends, he followed me home, so I kept him. I took him to the first family Christmas, and he didn't cope very well.
"He was a wild thing. He'd been living in the bush in a in a teepee for a year at this school, and I brought him to Bondi.
"It didn't work, it was like bringing a panther home and expecting it to just like go down and hang out at your local cafe."
The two started "re-wilding" camps in Australia.
"There's been these family camps running for about 12 years now, we'll get these days at 60 kids and their families all camping in the wilderness together. And every morning, the kids go out with mentors, and they learn how to make fire by rubbing sticks together, and they learn how to make shelters, and they make bows and arrows.
"There's no alcohol, there's no internet, there's no devices, there's no showers. People just jump in a river to swim, and it's an amazing thing."
At the age of 40 she found out she was pregnant, and then four days later that she had breast cancer.
"I was told that I had to terminate the pregnancy, or I'd die."
She decided to go ahead with the pregnancy while having treatment and her "miracle" daughter Blaise was born.
"She was healthy, she was amazing. She was this miracle child. She was so intelligent, and her presence was staggering. And then for three years, we just had this beautiful, idyllic life, living in the bush.
"None of us wearing shoes all of us just eating bush food when we could, growing veggies in the garden, having free range pigs. Her knowing the names of all the birds and talking to them in bird language, which was what I used to do when I was a kid. And, yeah, it was pretty, pretty beautiful."
But that idyll was shattered when Chick noticed a lump on her daughter's abdomen.
"It was like a rock, the size of my fist, yeah. And I knew immediately what it was.
"And so off we went to the hospital and got the diagnosis. And it was a neuroblastoma, they got it out and with surgery and they said, 'the margins are clear, the lymph nodes are clear, bone marrow is clear. Go home, come back in 10 weeks'. And in those 10 weeks, 200 tumours grew in her body, and she died."
Although engulfed with grief, she embraced it as a gift, she said.
"I said yes. I said yes to the hospital, I said yes to what was going on, and when it was time to let her go, I said yes to that. And then when she flew away, I said yes to that.
"And then when it was time to grieve, I said yes to that, and it's 11 years now, and every single day, I've really asked, 'what is grief asking of me?'
"Sometimes grief wants me to have a tantrum, and sometimes grief wants me to smash all the plates, and sometimes grief wants me to make love, and sometimes it wants me to laugh and go and see some silly movie. And sometimes it wants me to doom scroll, and sometimes it wants me to eat chocolate, and sometimes it wants me to just look out and stare at the clouds and hear her voice on the wind."
Gina Chick during her time on the SBS TV show Alone Australia. Photo: Narelle Portanier
She and Lee parted ways but remained friends and business partners, she said, and she had built a community all over the world.
"I'm not saying it was easy, but I let him go, and now I'm godmother to his two beautiful daughters, and we still run our camps together, and he's still one of my best friends."
And she had a world-wide community to connect with, she said.
"With this book, I get to communicate to everybody how much I love them.
"We're connected to something so vast and beautiful and wonderful that when we can kind of relax into that connection, we can get nourished by every single strand of the web and ultimately, ultimately realise that we are actually made of stars."
