Gina Chick survived by herself in the Tasmanian wilderness in winter for 67 days. She won the first season of survival documentary series Alone Australia and could have gone far longer, she tells Anika Moa in the latest episode of RNZ podcast It's Personal.
When she was surprised by her ex-husband telling her she had won the show, Chick reckons she had at least two more weeks worth of food in her handmade shelter - three fatty smoked eels, fish she had just caught and half a wallaby. She was cooking stews with lizards and worms and fish sperm and spring was coming.
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What made Chick a household name in Australia and New Zealand was her unique bond with the land that viewers saw unfold during her stay.
"The interesting thing about what I did on Alone is that normally, when we're watching these survival shows, what we're doing is we're watching suffering. We're watching people suffer with determination ... and we're usually watching the man versus wild trope," she tells Moa.
"What I did when I went out there is I showed a way of surviving that a lot of people know, but we never get to see on TV, where we're in harmony with nature, where we're actually connecting with nature, where we're asking to get our needs met from nature.
"So I was barefoot, dancing in the moss, singing to the fish, making friends with a platypus ... apologising to anything that I ate and and to the trees that I took down as well, and, and we got to see that. And I think that was the thing that resonated, and why I get stopped everywhere I go."
Chick visited NZ while promoting her new book, We Are The Stars. Photo: RNZ / Damian Golfinopoulos
The 54-year-old recently published her autobiography, We Are the Stars, a book she says was always in her. The book actually finishes without even touching on her time on Alone.
"The end of the book is just so bloody perfect I didn't want anything after it. So no, there's no, no Alone in it, it is literally all of the threads of a life that create the resilience to be able to do something like I did."
It covers a blissful childhood growing up in Jervis Bay on the south coast of NSW and details her bullied teens, raging younger years partying in Sydney. She writes of her experience learning she had breast cancer while pregnant at age 40, and the heartbreak of losing her daughter, Blaze, to the same disease at three years old.
"I was pregnant at 40 and I find out I have breast cancer, and they say you've got to terminate this pregnancy or you're going to die. And I said, 'No, I'm not going to'. I had chemo for three months while I was pregnant," she tells Moa.
"I fought so hard to get her here, and she arrived healthy. She was amazing, and she was beautiful. And because I'd been through so much and because I was an older mum, I never took her for granted, Not for one day, not for one minute.
"I would have been the most crap mum in my 20s or 30s. I would have been appalling. I would have been so appalling, but because I was older, and because I'd been through so much, like the quality of presence that I gave this kid meant that in those three years that we had together, it was like 30.
"I have no regrets. There's no story in my mind, 'if only', and I think, with the loss of a child, the 'if onlys' are a huge part of the grief.
"...But because of my unique circumstances, there are no 'if onlys' - there is nothing I would have done differently with her. Not one thing. So it meant that when I grieved, I just had to process the loss of her rather than any guilt or shame ... I got to grieve her in a clean way.
"And she didn't go missing. She didn't have horrible things happen to her .... I didn't have to identify her body. There are so many ways that women lose children that like break my heart but I got a very clean version of a very, very hard story, and it meant that when it came to losing her, I could say yes to it, and I could say yes to the grief.
"In the aftermath, it means that I have, every day, asked what grief wants of me,"
"... Because I've said yes to the grief and whatever it asked of me, I've always been bigger than it. It's never been bigger than me."
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