Gina Chick, winner of the first series of survival reality TV show Alone Australia, is speaking at the Headland Writers Festival in Tathra on Sunday, 20 October. Photo: Mark Rogers.
Gina Chick made a huge impression when she appeared in survival reality TV show Alone Australia. Her memoir We Are the Stars is deeply affecting people too.
“People ring me up in tears, but they are good tears,” Gina says. “One woman said she felt like she had been broken but put back together as more. To create that kind of response in a reader is every writer’s dream.”
The nature-loving Shoalhaven resident had been helping people to be at home in the wild for years when Alone Australia gave her the opportunity to test her self-taught skills for real.
“It was a really big thing to walk into Alone. It was a big risk,” she says.
In doing so, she also tested her belief that we all have an innate sense of wisdom from our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors that will surface if given the chance.
On Alone, she showed a way of living with nature by being receptive to it and asking nature for what she needed.
“It is dancing with nature, where my needs are as important as any other living thing.”
From the experience, Gina found she had the resilience that she thought she had.
“We all think we have resilience, then life has other ideas,” she says.
To her, resilience means forgetting about what you think you deserve and just being with the discomfort.
“Then the suffering goes, and the resilience means we can stay and find joy in every moment.”
While on Alone and throughout her life, Gina has drawn on the lesson that she is most grateful for from her parents: there is no limitation on what we are capable of if we follow our own creativity and dance our own dance.
She also learnt kindness from them.
“They are incredibly kind humans, and they take everyone as they are,” Gina says. “If someone acts or thinks differently, they have this incredible ability to embrace the human in the human.”
Gina confesses that she wasn’t always kind when she was in her 20s and 30s, but “these days I really try to hold everyone as carefully as I can”.
”The greatest gift anyone can give us is their attention and their time, so if they give that to me, I really respect that,” she says.
Gina Chick says the feedback on her memoir We Are the Stars has been incredible. Photo: Supplied.
She approaches life with a “caretaker’s heart”, looking to leave every situation slightly better than she found it. She wishes everyone looked at the world with caretaker eyes and a caretaker’s heart.
“This is what our First Nations people shout to us day in and day out,” Gina says. “All First Nations people just be with nature and that comes with connection. When you have to be connected to nature for survival, you respect it.
“It is only us disconnected Westerners who have lost our connection because we think we are more important. In nature, we are not.”
To promote We Are the Stars, publisher Simon & Schuster has organised its largest-ever book tour. It includes appearances at writers’ festivals and conversations with “some incredible writers, journalists and thinkers”.
So far, Gina has sat down with former ABC news presenter Richard Morecroft, actress and environmental activist Yael Stone, ABC presenter Leigh Sales, musician Clare Bowditch and author Holly Wainwright.
The tour visits NSW, Victoria, the ACT, South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. It runs into December but there’s no risk of Gina getting bored.
“Because this book is so rich and so diverse, everyone is bringing something different to it,” she says. “The questions are very varied, so every conversation is different.”
Gina will be speaking with ABC South East Radio’s Sophie Longden at the Headland Writers Festival in Tathra Town Hall at 9:30 am on Sunday, 20 October. She will talk about some of the deeper themes of the book, including the highs, lows and all the colours that make up being a human.
“To me, it is a birthright to experience everything life can throw at us,” Gina says. “If I have done my job properly, the reader will be deeply in love with life.”
Tickets for Gina’s session have sold out but visit the Headland Writers Festival website to join the waitlist or buy a ticket to livestream all the sessions in the Tathra Town Hall over the weekend.
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