Holy crap. I won Alone Australia.

May 26, 2023 2:11 AM

A huge spoiler for the show, written by the winner, is located inside the post, so avoid if you haven't watched it yet.

The winner: "I did it with the help of nine other incredible, amazing humans who made the choice to lay their lives on the line in the most exposing way possible. They chronicled their journeys with honesty and integrity and if you have any judgement about their choices, I invite you to walk your talk, pack up your life, take ten items into a freezing winter wilderness with very little available food and see how well you do once the calories drain out of your system and the immensity of drop shock falls on you like a mountain.

"Instead, please celebrate their courage, their capacity for transformation, their ability to say yes to something marvellous that will change their lives forever. Every single one of these people is a real, 3D human with loves and challenges and stories you will never see. Hold them with tenderness and compassion and kindness, if you can, because they are you and me and we are all each other underneath our skins."

Alone Australia is based on the American original. It is real reality TV and the highest rating and largest production ever undertaken by the SBS public broadcaster. Like the original, contestants are dropped into isolation and stay alive on their own wits, with ten special items and suitcase loads of camera equipment.

Mike, the runner up, was a Macgyver who relied on tools and was brilliant at creating them but each one failed to give him sufficient food for the calorie cost. Low blood pressure from malnourishment ended his challenge at 64 days when he was medically tapped out. Together, Mike and Gina marked the longest stretch with only two participants in the franchise’s history

The winner was informed of their win at 67 days, becoming the third woman to win the endurance event by which time her shelter was a cosy dome of brush with a door, a raised timber bed soft with grasses, a large rock indoor stove with chimney, and stores of smoked eel and wallaby jerky. She might have made another twenty days. Now, nine months later, she and her friends are able to celebrate publically.

posted by Thella (13 comments total)

So much filming, so many camera demands, and yet a key image in Gina's journey goes predominately un-recorded: woman having a wee jumps wallaby.
posted by Thella at 2:13 AM on May 26, 2023 [5 favorites]

I won because lutruwita opened her muddy arms and welcomed me home. She revealed herself to me in every moment, in platypus splashes and wormy bacon. In fish sperm and moss on which to dance. She blessed me with sea eagles and ravens and ducks to greet me each morning. She raked me with a dirty claw and said WAKE UP, and I will never be the same again. She challenged me to the core of my being, then held me while I wept. She caught those tears and turned them to golden light, shimmering on the skin of the lake. She dropped her huge and heavy paw on me until I faced my deepest fears and yearnings, and then she called me out to dance in the sunshine. She will always be my home.

Amazing and so well-deserved!
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:31 AM on May 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Maybe don’t spoil in the lead?!
posted by jjderooy at 4:05 AM on May 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yes please don't spoil in the opener of the post! I want to watch this.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:44 AM on May 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Post edited to move spoiler info below the fold.

Folks, please always keep spoilers for the show inside the post.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:01 AM on May 26, 2023 [3 favorites]

Shielding my eyes from spoilers, but glad you posted this so I can come back to it when we're done watching!
posted by joannemerriam at 9:07 AM on May 26, 2023

I was so pleased that she won. I really loved her whole approach of treating the experience as a chance to become a more-connected part of nature rather than triumphing over it or battling against it, with nature as something external to her. I mean surely the whole point is that we are part of nature, however much we let civilisation hide that fact from us. (Not to make myself sound superior - I am reliant on electricity, drugs to treat my medical conditions and the civilised conveniences that are actually pretty essential for me. I'm well aware I wouldn't last five minutes out there!)
posted by Athanassiel at 8:22 PM on May 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

I really loved her whole approach of treating the experience as a chance to become a more-connected part of nature rather than triumphing over it or battling against it, with nature as something external to her.

"That's not mental game. This is mental game."

Also very pleased to see that both she and the runner up appear to have been the only ones resistant enough to toxic cultural programming to have deliberately stacked on a big store of body fat before heading out.
posted by flabdablet at 9:25 PM on May 26, 2023

Re: the body fat, that made me uncomfortable. I absolutely see the point of it as a strategy, but both Gina and Mike made it quite clear that it wasn't normal, they didn't like being "fat" (neither of them was actually fat, just fatter than they usually were). So you know, it's ok to be temporarily fat in order to win a competition, but no one would actually want to be like that all the time, right? Sigh.
posted by Athanassiel at 10:20 PM on May 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm way fatter than either of those people, and as far as I'm concerned they have every bit as much right as I do to decide for themselves the body composition that best suits them. So I was just pleased to see the two participants I'd already marked as having easily the clearest understanding of what they were about to do treat fat as a resource they could use instead of avoiding it like some kind of disease.

Watching Gina's reaction to finding herself unexpectedly unable to rise elegantly from sitting on a log gave me a chuckle of recognition as well :-)
posted by flabdablet at 12:27 AM on May 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah I'm probably fatter than Gina and Mike put together. I'm not disputing their right to be whatever weight suits them and to use temporary fat as part of their survival strategy. It just made me uncomfortable is all. Bolsters the popular conception that being fat is a choice and that if you don't lose weight it's just laziness.

As for sitting on logs, I miss the time when my knees worked well enough to allow me to do that.
posted by Athanassiel at 1:36 AM on May 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I just tried to watch one of the vids. The hoops they make you jump through makes viewing not worth it.
What a shame.
posted by james33 at 4:39 AM on May 28, 2023

I live in Australia, so my taxes help fund SBS content and they broadcast it to me at no charge. And yet, as is very nearly always the case, I found acquiring this series via online file sharing to be compellingly more convenient than going the official route.

I have been asked to stop posting links to help others do likewise because doing so has been causing an unpleasant degree of blowback for the administrative team here. So I'll confine myself to observing that access to a fast Netherlands seedbox can be had for far less per month than any streaming service and works much, much better.
posted by flabdablet at 6:16 AM on May 28, 2023