September 28, 2024 • 16 mins
Gina Chick is no stranger to survival - and she's proven herself to be pretty tough emotionally.
She famously survived alone in the Tasmanian wilderness for 68 days with barely any supplies and no food during the cold winter months.
Outside of the competitions, she's had to battle some personal challenges - she's had cancer twice, tragically lost her three-year-old daughter and endured a young life where she felt like she could never fit in.
She says she's always felt connected to the Australian wilderness - and it helped inspire a love of writing stories.
"I can't fake it - I am the world's worst actor, which I discovered when I had my first foray into presenting. I can't do a script, I can't play someone else, I can't pretend - you can see what's going on on my face."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You're with a Sunday Session. I'm Francesca Rudkin with you
until midday. Good to have you with us. When Gina
Chick won the inaugural Alone Australia competition, she showed just
how tough she is. For those of you unfamiliar, Gina
survived alone in the Tasmanian wilderness in winter for sixty
seven days, with barely any supplies and no food. Outside
(00:36):
of the competition, Gina hasn't had an easy life. There's
been two cancer battles, the loss of her three year
old daughter, and a young life lived feeling like she
just didn't quite fit in. Gina has shared has shared
her story in a new Bocke's called We Are the Stars,
and Gena Chick is in the country and joins me. Now, Hi, Gena, Hi, Francesca,
(00:57):
so nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's so lovely to be here. And I've got to say,
alta roa.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What a welcome?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Are you loving it?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh my god, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Have you had any time to hit the wild?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
No, not this time, but I have spent time here before. Yeah,
and I do love it. Love the humans too, so.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Much to talk to you about. Let's start showy a
little bit. At the beginning. You had this aching loneliness
growing up. You talk about not understanding human ways, being
told that you were just too much for people. What
was that like for you as.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
A little kid. It was confusing, partly because when I
was at home, I had this amazing family life, and
you know, I was completely accepted and it was just
normal to be odd in my family. So then to
go to school and have a completely different experience was
confusing and strange. I felt like I understood the language
(01:53):
of nature really well. I never felt separate from nature.
I never felt like I was Gina and then there
was the bush. It was more like nature was me
and I was it. And then I'd go to school
and find that everybody else was a human and I
didn't quite know how to do that.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
So how did you cope with that loneliness? Obviously you
had that connection with nature and the love of birds
and things and animals, but how did you deal with
that loneliness? How did you get through school?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Books were a huge part of it. When I was
six years old, a family friend gave me The Jungle
Book by Radyard Kipling, and he said, you know, sometimes
books understand us better than people, and I think this
book is going to understand you very well. And he
was right. I read the Jungle Book, and my whole
(02:45):
world changed. The gena who started reading the book wasn't
the gena who finished it, Like my entire internal reality
had changed. My view of the world had changed, and
I was so enamored of the reality of the Jungle Book.
I wanted it to be a part of me, and
I wanted those characters to be part of me. So
I tore the corner of pages and ate them because
(03:10):
I wanted to take the story so deeply into myself
that it could never leave. And that began a lifelong
love affair with books and with stories. And I don't
even know how many books I've eaten. But when I
was at school and things were bad, I had this
whole internal reality, in this whole internal life where the
characters of the books were my friends and they were
(03:33):
my allies, so that, along with nature and music, they
became my touchstones.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
But as you say, you had this incredibly loving and
supportive family and your mother always said to you, you'll
find your tribe. When did you find your tribe?
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Not until I was really in my twenties and I
went to Sydney to go to university and discovered the
queer scene or the gay scene. At the time, we
didn't even really call it queer. It was just the
gay scene on Oxford Street in Sydney. Back in those days.
It was one of those little slices of time where
(04:12):
everything opened up and the whole place was like Studio
fifty four. And I found that the community, the gay community,
the queer community, they didn't revile me for my bigness
and my strangeness and my creativity. They loved it. And
it meant that I could express those parts of mysel myselves.
(04:34):
I could express those parts of myself that historically I
had been sort of outcast for.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
It must have been a huge relief because it takes
so much energy to try and fit teren, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Yeah, And I've never been any good at it, like
I can't. I can't fake it. I am the world's
worst actor, which I discovered when I tried, when I
had my first foray into presenting. I can't do a script.
I can't play someone else. I can't pretend like you
can see what's going on on my face. Absolutely, there
is no filter and there's no way of hiding it.
(05:08):
So for me that trying to fit in part was
just strange at school and I was very bad at it.
And then to get to the Yeah, to get to
the queer scene, the gay scene in Sydney, I didn't
have to pretend.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And you've got such a gorgeous story about hitting too.
Was it university and pretty much on the first day
of your course meeting Hugh Jackman and you have this
beautiful friendship which has lasted for decades and he was
someone that got you.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, Yeah, he's great. It's been thirty seven years now,
I think we've been friends and yeah, he's just always
been there.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
The prologue to the book, it talks about what your
daughter has taught you and what you learned from her
life and her death and Blazed out of cancer when
she was just three. What did you learn from that?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Oh? Yeah, I've learned so much from Blaze. And I
say that because I have grieved with every part of me,
because I've said yes to every part of that grief,
and because I ask every day what is grief asking
of me? My experience is that grief demands to be felt,
(06:22):
and we live in a culture where we don't have
the healthy ceremonies and rituals and tools to be able
to be with grief that our hunter gatherer ancestors have had,
and also that First Nations people have. You know, our
white Western culture has somehow taken grief and put it
in a box and turned the volume down and stuck.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
It under the bed.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And as a result of that, it's you know, where
do we go to learn how to be with grief? Somehow,
because of my whole childhood and my adulthood of learning
how to process my emotions and looking under every rock
in myself for what might be there for studying First
(07:06):
Nation and indigenous cultures and also hunter gatherer technologies, it
meant that when I lost my daughter, I didn't turn
to the white Western way. Instead, I connected with a
deeper wisdom in my DNA, which is about ceremony and
ritual and is about feeling everything. And as a result,
(07:28):
I can say that even though the grief was and
is huge, I was always just that little bit bigger.
I could always hold it in my awareness. It was
never bigger than me, and as a result of that,
I've been able to let it change me and grow
me so that I can say that having my daughter
(07:49):
was the greatest gift of my life, but losing her
has been the second greatest gift of my life. And
because of losing her, I am bigger and I am wiser,
I'm more compassionate, I'm a much nicer person. I have
more ability to hold, I have more ability to bring
my creativity into the world. So for me, every step
(08:09):
that I take is actually her gift.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, such a beautiful place to be and somewhere which
I think so many people want to be after grief.
But I think you're right. I think if we don't
have if people aren't allowed to grieve in their own
way as well, you know, like I think we're even
conscious sometimes of how we grieve and if something might
feel natural to you to want to do, but everyone
else kind of rolls or us and goes on what's
(08:32):
going on, you know, like it's too much judgment. You've
just got to it's almost about going with your instincts
and going with your gat Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I would say that, and the other thing that I
would say is everybody grieves differently, and grief is very,
very selfish. Whatever our grief is, it's really hard to
think of anyone hurting as much as we are, feeling
the same way that we do, or wanting to express
that grief in the same way. So for some people
it's numbness, for some people it's coldness, and then the
people around them are going, why aren't you falling apart?
(09:01):
There's something wrong with you, Whereas I just feel like
grief sort of hits our own fingerprint, like the fingerprint
of our heart, the fingerprint of our biology, the fingerprint
of our expression in the world, and however we dance
with it, that is our dance, and there are things
to learn from that, But it can be suspect to
(09:22):
the people around us, and I think that's very sad.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
You also had a battle with cancer, and of course
this is when you got pregnant. You had this beautiful,
miracle baby, and then you discovered that you were you
had cancer and you were advised to terminate the pregnancy,
and you decided not to. How do you make that?
How did you make that decision? Yes, that's an impossible
(09:49):
position to be put in it. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah. So I found out I was pregnant at forty
thinking I could never carry a pregnancy, found out I
was pregnant, and then four days later I found out
I had breast cancer. So it was right at the
beginning of the pregnancy and the doctors said, you must
terminate this p ignancy or you will die. I was
told that you will die if you don't terminate this pregnancy,
(10:11):
and a part of me just said, no, that's you
can't tell me that this is an absolute. The thing
with statistics in the medical profession is they are We're
given the middle of a bell curve. That's what we're
given with statistics. It's the most likely outcome. It's from
double blind clinical studies, it's from years of medical research,
(10:33):
and here is the average of what you can expect.
And that is how doctors give us advice, which is
what they have to do. But I know that I'm
not on the middle of a bell curve, and so
my initial response was, no, I don't accept this. There
has to be a way, And originally I went through
(10:55):
a whole process of looking for alternative treatments and none
of them worked. So at five months, I think I
had chemo for three months. So there was also the
having to come to terms with if the you know,
if the hippie stuff that I was trying didn't work,
the option to save my life and the life of
my daughter was chemo, and so a lot of my
(11:17):
time and my prep went into preparing myself for that
eventuality so that if I did have to say yes
to the chemo, I would be able to function well
and not have side effects. But I didn't have any
side effects apart from losing my hair, and I didn't
even get sick, which this particular chemo makes everybody sick.
(11:38):
So all the stuff I was doing was really helping,
and I still had to make that choice. And I
think there's this beautiful balancing act of all of the
purveyors of medicine are my advisors, Like there's Western medicine,
but there's also a whole bunch of other medicines. I
(12:00):
don't want to ignore the wisdom in any of them,
but ultimately, the choice of the combination that I put
them into, that's my choice, but it's also the consequences
of mine. It could have gone the other way. I
could not be here right now, and it just so
happened that I found a path through where I danced
with conventional medicine and I also danced with some more
(12:23):
esoteric flavors.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
So, Gina, when you've been through some of the worst
experiences that life has to offer you, you had to
deal with your cancer, losing your beautiful girl at age three,
and things like that, I imagine when somebody said to you,
would you like to come into the wilderness of Tasmania
on your own? You probably went, you know, not a problem,
that's great, I'll do that. And of course you did
this for a Lone Australia, which is a pretty crazy
(12:49):
reality show in a sense. You're sent into the wilderness
in Tasmania, you've got no food, you're allowed to take
ten survival items with you. It's winter, harsh, harsh conditions.
But you didn't just survive, you thrived.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
I did the other thing about alone that makes it
not even so much conventional reality show. It's more of
a docu series. There's no there's no film crewis there's
no producers. It's not like they're there. You've got producers
sort of stage directing things. It's not like there's a
camera crew.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
To dance on the moss. Yeah, yeah, go on.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
You know it's basically we got dropped out there with
ken items and seventy kilos of camera gear and they're like, Radio,
you've got a film for five or six hours a day.
We have no control over what you're going to do. Basically,
you're making a documentary, So what story do you want
to tell? And it was beautiful because as soon as
I the producer, said that what story do you want
(13:45):
to tell in your documentary? Something landed in me and
I'd gone from being sort of in this frenzy of
what am I going to what items are going to take?
What are my strategies? How am I going to survive?
To oh, I get to make a documentary. I'm a creative,
I'm a storyteller. I get to make a documentary. And
(14:05):
suddenly it was the most exciting thing ever. So part
of the thriving for me was that I made a
vow of veracity. I said, Radio, the only way I
can do this is if I tell the truth. I'm
not going to edit myself. I'm not going to second
guess myself. I'm just going to keep the cameras rolling
no matter what. And it meant that I would go
(14:26):
through the emotional turmoil of surviving out there, but you
would also see me come out of it and less sbs.
They would show that instead of just the drama, they
would actually show the resolution as well. So I was
dancing in the moss barefoot, I was I made friends
with the platypus. I was singing to the fish to
(14:46):
call them, and I was pulling out fish left, right
and center. I caught something like thirty fish and twelve
eels and jumped on a wallabie and ate that for
a month, and I had an experience of the way
I describe it is I died, and I dissolved, and
I was regrown as part of the interc connected web
(15:07):
of life, no more or less important than any bird
or bee, or tree or fish. And what that meant
was because I didn't think I was important and I
had to challenge nature or solve the problem of nature.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I really was, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Just another tree, or just another fish, or just another bird.
It meant that when I needed something, I would ask
and it would come. It was almost like this universe
bush magic would happen. And so yeah, I was out
there for sixty seven days. I was really annoyed when
they came to get me because I wanted to do
ninety and I still had three weeks worth of food.
(15:43):
When they came to get me, I fed Lee lunch.
So Lee is my ex husband and he was the
one who turned up to say, surprise, you've won. And yeah,
when we were packing up, I was feeding him all
the Probably, we have.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
To go and get her out because she will sit
here forever and to finish this show. If they were
joking that.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I was carving Christmas decorations, oh my god, what are
we going to do? She's here forever.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh, Gina, thank you so much for the book, for
sharing your story, and for coming and talking to us today.
It's been fantastic.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Thank you so much. And I've just got to say
that I love being here and everyone that I've spoken
to in Al tay Am, I saying that right Alta,
they've just been You've all just been so welcoming, and
I love that my book is going to land in
such beautiful hearts.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Thank you so much, Gina. And that book is called
We Are the Stars. It's in stores this week.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudken, listen
live to news Talks it Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You're with a Sunday Session. I'm Francesca Rudkin with you
until midday. Good to have you with us. When Gina
Chick won the inaugural Alone Australia competition, she showed just
how tough she is. For those of you unfamiliar, Gina
survived alone in the Tasmanian wilderness in winter for sixty
seven days, with barely any supplies and no food. Outside
(00:36):
of the competition, Gina hasn't had an easy life. There's
been two cancer battles, the loss of her three year
old daughter, and a young life lived feeling like she
just didn't quite fit in. Gina has shared has shared
her story in a new Bocke's called We Are the Stars,
and Gena Chick is in the country and joins me. Now, Hi, Gena, Hi, Francesca,
(00:57):
so nice to meet you.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's so lovely to be here. And I've got to say,
alta roa.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
What a welcome?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Are you loving it?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh my god, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Have you had any time to hit the wild?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
No, not this time, but I have spent time here before. Yeah,
and I do love it. Love the humans too, so.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Much to talk to you about. Let's start showy a
little bit. At the beginning. You had this aching loneliness
growing up. You talk about not understanding human ways, being
told that you were just too much for people. What
was that like for you as.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
A little kid. It was confusing, partly because when I
was at home, I had this amazing family life, and
you know, I was completely accepted and it was just
normal to be odd in my family. So then to
go to school and have a completely different experience was
confusing and strange. I felt like I understood the language
(01:53):
of nature really well. I never felt separate from nature.
I never felt like I was Gina and then there
was the bush. It was more like nature was me
and I was it. And then I'd go to school
and find that everybody else was a human and I
didn't quite know how to do that.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
So how did you cope with that loneliness? Obviously you
had that connection with nature and the love of birds
and things and animals, but how did you deal with
that loneliness? How did you get through school?
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Books were a huge part of it. When I was
six years old, a family friend gave me The Jungle
Book by Radyard Kipling, and he said, you know, sometimes
books understand us better than people, and I think this
book is going to understand you very well. And he
was right. I read the Jungle Book, and my whole
(02:45):
world changed. The gena who started reading the book wasn't
the gena who finished it, Like my entire internal reality
had changed. My view of the world had changed, and
I was so enamored of the reality of the Jungle Book.
I wanted it to be a part of me, and
I wanted those characters to be part of me. So
I tore the corner of pages and ate them because
(03:10):
I wanted to take the story so deeply into myself
that it could never leave. And that began a lifelong
love affair with books and with stories. And I don't
even know how many books I've eaten. But when I
was at school and things were bad, I had this
whole internal reality, in this whole internal life where the
characters of the books were my friends and they were
(03:33):
my allies, so that, along with nature and music, they
became my touchstones.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
But as you say, you had this incredibly loving and
supportive family and your mother always said to you, you'll
find your tribe. When did you find your tribe?
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Not until I was really in my twenties and I
went to Sydney to go to university and discovered the
queer scene or the gay scene. At the time, we
didn't even really call it queer. It was just the
gay scene on Oxford Street in Sydney. Back in those days.
It was one of those little slices of time where
(04:12):
everything opened up and the whole place was like Studio
fifty four. And I found that the community, the gay community,
the queer community, they didn't revile me for my bigness
and my strangeness and my creativity. They loved it. And
it meant that I could express those parts of mysel myselves.
(04:34):
I could express those parts of myself that historically I
had been sort of outcast for.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
It must have been a huge relief because it takes
so much energy to try and fit teren, doesn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
Yeah, And I've never been any good at it, like
I can't. I can't fake it. I am the world's
worst actor, which I discovered when I tried, when I
had my first foray into presenting. I can't do a script.
I can't play someone else. I can't pretend like you
can see what's going on on my face. Absolutely, there
is no filter and there's no way of hiding it.
(05:08):
So for me that trying to fit in part was
just strange at school and I was very bad at it.
And then to get to the Yeah, to get to
the queer scene, the gay scene in Sydney, I didn't
have to pretend.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And you've got such a gorgeous story about hitting too.
Was it university and pretty much on the first day
of your course meeting Hugh Jackman and you have this
beautiful friendship which has lasted for decades and he was
someone that got you.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Yeah, Yeah, he's great. It's been thirty seven years now,
I think we've been friends and yeah, he's just always
been there.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
The prologue to the book, it talks about what your
daughter has taught you and what you learned from her
life and her death and Blazed out of cancer when
she was just three. What did you learn from that?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
Oh? Yeah, I've learned so much from Blaze. And I
say that because I have grieved with every part of me,
because I've said yes to every part of that grief,
and because I ask every day what is grief asking
of me? My experience is that grief demands to be felt,
(06:22):
and we live in a culture where we don't have
the healthy ceremonies and rituals and tools to be able
to be with grief that our hunter gatherer ancestors have had,
and also that First Nations people have. You know, our
white Western culture has somehow taken grief and put it
in a box and turned the volume down and stuck.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
It under the bed.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
And as a result of that, it's you know, where
do we go to learn how to be with grief? Somehow,
because of my whole childhood and my adulthood of learning
how to process my emotions and looking under every rock
in myself for what might be there for studying First
(07:06):
Nation and indigenous cultures and also hunter gatherer technologies, it
meant that when I lost my daughter, I didn't turn
to the white Western way. Instead, I connected with a
deeper wisdom in my DNA, which is about ceremony and
ritual and is about feeling everything. And as a result,
(07:28):
I can say that even though the grief was and
is huge, I was always just that little bit bigger.
I could always hold it in my awareness. It was
never bigger than me, and as a result of that,
I've been able to let it change me and grow
me so that I can say that having my daughter
(07:49):
was the greatest gift of my life, but losing her
has been the second greatest gift of my life. And
because of losing her, I am bigger and I am wiser,
I'm more compassionate, I'm a much nicer person. I have
more ability to hold, I have more ability to bring
my creativity into the world. So for me, every step
(08:09):
that I take is actually her gift.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, such a beautiful place to be and somewhere which
I think so many people want to be after grief.
But I think you're right. I think if we don't
have if people aren't allowed to grieve in their own
way as well, you know, like I think we're even
conscious sometimes of how we grieve and if something might
feel natural to you to want to do, but everyone
else kind of rolls or us and goes on what's
(08:32):
going on, you know, like it's too much judgment. You've
just got to it's almost about going with your instincts
and going with your gat Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3 (08:39):
I would say that, and the other thing that I
would say is everybody grieves differently, and grief is very,
very selfish. Whatever our grief is, it's really hard to
think of anyone hurting as much as we are, feeling
the same way that we do, or wanting to express
that grief in the same way. So for some people
it's numbness, for some people it's coldness, and then the
people around them are going, why aren't you falling apart?
(09:01):
There's something wrong with you, Whereas I just feel like
grief sort of hits our own fingerprint, like the fingerprint
of our heart, the fingerprint of our biology, the fingerprint
of our expression in the world, and however we dance
with it, that is our dance, and there are things
to learn from that, But it can be suspect to
(09:22):
the people around us, and I think that's very sad.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
You also had a battle with cancer, and of course
this is when you got pregnant. You had this beautiful,
miracle baby, and then you discovered that you were you
had cancer and you were advised to terminate the pregnancy,
and you decided not to. How do you make that?
How did you make that decision? Yes, that's an impossible
(09:49):
position to be put in it. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yeah. So I found out I was pregnant at forty
thinking I could never carry a pregnancy, found out I
was pregnant, and then four days later I found out
I had breast cancer. So it was right at the
beginning of the pregnancy and the doctors said, you must
terminate this p ignancy or you will die. I was
told that you will die if you don't terminate this pregnancy,
(10:11):
and a part of me just said, no, that's you
can't tell me that this is an absolute. The thing
with statistics in the medical profession is they are We're
given the middle of a bell curve. That's what we're
given with statistics. It's the most likely outcome. It's from
double blind clinical studies, it's from years of medical research,
(10:33):
and here is the average of what you can expect.
And that is how doctors give us advice, which is
what they have to do. But I know that I'm
not on the middle of a bell curve, and so
my initial response was, no, I don't accept this. There
has to be a way, And originally I went through
(10:55):
a whole process of looking for alternative treatments and none
of them worked. So at five months, I think I
had chemo for three months. So there was also the
having to come to terms with if the you know,
if the hippie stuff that I was trying didn't work,
the option to save my life and the life of
my daughter was chemo, and so a lot of my
(11:17):
time and my prep went into preparing myself for that
eventuality so that if I did have to say yes
to the chemo, I would be able to function well
and not have side effects. But I didn't have any
side effects apart from losing my hair, and I didn't
even get sick, which this particular chemo makes everybody sick.
(11:38):
So all the stuff I was doing was really helping,
and I still had to make that choice. And I
think there's this beautiful balancing act of all of the
purveyors of medicine are my advisors, Like there's Western medicine,
but there's also a whole bunch of other medicines. I
(12:00):
don't want to ignore the wisdom in any of them,
but ultimately, the choice of the combination that I put
them into, that's my choice, but it's also the consequences
of mine. It could have gone the other way. I
could not be here right now, and it just so
happened that I found a path through where I danced
with conventional medicine and I also danced with some more
(12:23):
esoteric flavors.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
So, Gina, when you've been through some of the worst
experiences that life has to offer you, you had to
deal with your cancer, losing your beautiful girl at age three,
and things like that, I imagine when somebody said to you,
would you like to come into the wilderness of Tasmania
on your own? You probably went, you know, not a problem,
that's great, I'll do that. And of course you did
this for a Lone Australia, which is a pretty crazy
(12:49):
reality show in a sense. You're sent into the wilderness
in Tasmania, you've got no food, you're allowed to take
ten survival items with you. It's winter, harsh, harsh conditions.
But you didn't just survive, you thrived.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
I did the other thing about alone that makes it
not even so much conventional reality show. It's more of
a docu series. There's no there's no film crewis there's
no producers. It's not like they're there. You've got producers
sort of stage directing things. It's not like there's a
camera crew.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
To dance on the moss. Yeah, yeah, go on.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
You know it's basically we got dropped out there with
ken items and seventy kilos of camera gear and they're like, Radio,
you've got a film for five or six hours a day.
We have no control over what you're going to do. Basically,
you're making a documentary, So what story do you want
to tell? And it was beautiful because as soon as
I the producer, said that what story do you want
(13:45):
to tell in your documentary? Something landed in me and
I'd gone from being sort of in this frenzy of
what am I going to what items are going to take?
What are my strategies? How am I going to survive?
To oh, I get to make a documentary. I'm a creative,
I'm a storyteller. I get to make a documentary. And
(14:05):
suddenly it was the most exciting thing ever. So part
of the thriving for me was that I made a
vow of veracity. I said, Radio, the only way I
can do this is if I tell the truth. I'm
not going to edit myself. I'm not going to second
guess myself. I'm just going to keep the cameras rolling
no matter what. And it meant that I would go
(14:26):
through the emotional turmoil of surviving out there, but you
would also see me come out of it and less sbs.
They would show that instead of just the drama, they
would actually show the resolution as well. So I was
dancing in the moss barefoot, I was I made friends
with the platypus. I was singing to the fish to
(14:46):
call them, and I was pulling out fish left, right
and center. I caught something like thirty fish and twelve
eels and jumped on a wallabie and ate that for
a month, and I had an experience of the way
I describe it is I died, and I dissolved, and
I was regrown as part of the interc connected web
(15:07):
of life, no more or less important than any bird
or bee, or tree or fish. And what that meant
was because I didn't think I was important and I
had to challenge nature or solve the problem of nature.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I really was, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Just another tree, or just another fish, or just another bird.
It meant that when I needed something, I would ask
and it would come. It was almost like this universe
bush magic would happen. And so yeah, I was out
there for sixty seven days. I was really annoyed when
they came to get me because I wanted to do
ninety and I still had three weeks worth of food.
(15:43):
When they came to get me, I fed Lee lunch.
So Lee is my ex husband and he was the
one who turned up to say, surprise, you've won. And yeah,
when we were packing up, I was feeding him all
the Probably, we have.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
To go and get her out because she will sit
here forever and to finish this show. If they were
joking that.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
I was carving Christmas decorations, oh my god, what are
we going to do? She's here forever.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Oh, Gina, thank you so much for the book, for
sharing your story, and for coming and talking to us today.
It's been fantastic.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
Thank you so much. And I've just got to say
that I love being here and everyone that I've spoken
to in Al tay Am, I saying that right Alta,
they've just been You've all just been so welcoming, and
I love that my book is going to land in
such beautiful hearts.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Thank you so much, Gina. And that book is called
We Are the Stars. It's in stores this week.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudken, listen
live to news Talks it Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
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