We Are The Stars
by Gina Chick
Summit Books
Gina Chick was one of ten participants for the first series of Alone Australia, a reality television program on SBS in 2023 where individuals, isolated from each other, had to survive in a wilderness.
After 67 days of unforgettable moments of searing vulnerability, Gina was the last person standing and her determination, passion and love of the natural world endeared her to 5.5 million people around Australia.
This is her story.
Actually, it is more than a memoir of what experiences forged the type of person capable of surviving that long in the wild western coast of Tasmania, during winter. It is a tale of how to re-connect with what we have lost, as individuals and as a society.
Gina found out fairly early on that she was different to most children, but Frankie was different as well, which is why he lived by himself with lots of dogs and not many friends. He had no children, recalls a six year-old Gina, because he was a homosexual, but he gave her a book.
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling made the walls of her bedroom disappear as she became one with Mowgli’s Africa. Then came White Fang’s icy wasteland, Bilbo, Frodo and Sam’s forests, Storm Boy’s beach and the wonderful worlds of Narnia.
Although Gina wanted to be Modesty Blaise when she grew up, she found herself at university, missing the pulse of the earth that she had felt in childhood in the noisy city. Gay night clubs and drugs supplied a different pulse in the nineties.
Working as a masseuse and a security guard for the all-female Charlie’s Angels Security Service, Gina looked as if she had her shit together but in reality, she had “lost the connection with the girl who danced with storms and talked to birds”.
After hitting rock bottom and nearly dying, she escaped to a remote island, 600kms north of Cairns. The wild devoured the Gina of “nightclubs, concrete and heartbreak”. Lulled by the tides and the wind, she felt “Mowgli’s fiery hunger for life” return to her.
Gina’s journey is as harrowing as it is inspirational. Time and time again, Gina returns to the wilderness to find healing, finding that birth and death are from “the same damn door”.
Her book is more than lessons about how to live with nature … it is about finding your true self, about living life to the fullest and about diving into the depths of grief and learning to swim back to the surface.
Lezly Herbert
