Alone Australia’s debut season premieres on SBS on Demand this week. Junkee spoke with contestants Duane and Kate about their experience surviving solo in lutruwita (Tasmania) and what diversity really means to them.
Although it’s been months since she was in the wilderness that served as Alone Australia’s set, Kate Grarock can’t stop thinking about rain. “It was like I’ve never experienced before” she explains over Zoom from her Canberra home. A seasoned outdoor guide and wildlife biologist, Kate’s definitely no stranger to the elements, but since being back with her wife and young child she’s still struck by the memory of rain that took on an almost mystical quality while alone in the freezing ruggedness of Tasmania.
“There was this rain one day on the lake and I was just, like, terrible,” Kate recalls. “It was cold, but it was making this amazing pattern on the surface and I was just like, wow. I’ve never seen something like that. It was so beautiful.”
Kate is one of the 10 contestants from Australia’s debut season of Alone, the survival show that’s found success by stripping back the usual reality TV trappings of similar shows like Running Wild with Bear Grylls. Contestants are tasked with surviving for as long as they can while in complete isolation. There are no directors and camera operators, contestants are tasked with recording their experiences themselves.
But while Alone strives to present the most realistic survival experience possible, something artificial has always stuck out about the show. The first season was almost entirely made-up of white men – while subsequent seasons slowly introduced contestants of different races, religions, and sexualities the show has also seriously struggled to find Indigenous people willing to compete.
Alone Australia changed all of that.
The Scouts Were “Boys Only”
Kate’s hometown straddled the south-east ranges of South Australia, close to the Victorian border. Her family was held together by her strong-willed feminist mother – a term Kate says “wasn’t thrown around too much” in rural SA. With a childhood full of camping trips amongst the sandstone mountains of Grampians National Park, Kate’s held a lifelong love for the outdoors. But she found there were barriers to exploring that passion.
Jealous of the outdoor skills her brother was learning at a local scout group, Kate was devastated to learn that she wasn’t allowed to join, even after her mother marched down to the troop hall to give the scout leader a piece of her mind. The scouts, Kate was told, were for boys only.
Later, stricken with glandular fever in her final year of high school, Kate was faced with the prospect of repeating in order to graduate. “I think it was that sort of pigheadedness, stubbornness in me was like, “I’m not repeating, I know I’ll join the Navy!” Kate recalls. Joining up with the goal of becoming a qualified marine scientist, her work catapulted Kate away from her small South Australian hometown with trips across the country – including a seminal visit to the Great Barrier Reef.
The job was eye-opening in other ways too. The large number of queer women and openly gay men among her colleagues made an impression on Kate, whose previous exposure to LGBTIQ+ people was “evil characters on television”. “That opened my eyes,” she remembers. “I remember being like, oh wow, interesting.”
Sadly, four years into her service with the Navy, the rhythm of her comfortable career was interrupted by tragedy when Kate’s mother passed away. She describes the moment as equally tragic and cathartic:
“I think I realised then that, you know, life is short and you need to be working in something you’re really passionate about, because I might only get 46 years of life.”
“We Are Afraid Of Being Discriminated Against”… Representation Has A Price
Contestants on reality survival television shows haven’t exactly been displayed as three-dimensional characters over the long life of the genre. From that one contestant on Survivor who marked his exit from the show with a performance worthy of an Ruben Östlund movie to Grylls routinely appearing in scenes where he consumes his own urine, we expect contestants on survival shows to be pretty eccentric.
“I do understand why, Indigenous people or LGBTIQ+ people don’t apply for it,” says First Nations contestant Duane. “It’s because we are afraid of being discriminated against.”
A self-described “Campbelltown kid”, Duane’s path to Alone starts with a childhood spent amongst theestuaries of the Georges River in Western Sydney. “It was a lower socioeconomic kind of area, but I didn’t see anything different about it at all,” he says, describing a youth spent riding bikes and exploring with his three younger sisters.
Aside from being a central figure in his life, Duane’s great-grandmother was a precious connection to his Indigenous heritage. A member of the Stolen Generation, her history features tragedies he “wouldn’t ever tell to media ever”. But like many victims of the government’s notorious displacement of Indigenous children, Duane’s exact knowledge of his Indigenous ancestry comes in fragments.
“I’m still putting the pieces together,” he says. “But I’ve grown up to be so proud of where [my great-grandmother] has come from and I’ll make sure that that line stays on in our family through my children. My son’s coming home from school and speaking a bit of thorough language. He’s getting prouder and we’re finding more about our culture, it’s really a beautiful thing.”
Despite not being a fan of reality TV, Duane was recommended Alone while working at the Rural Fire Service. Noticing some edible plants while conducting fire management in a catchment area, Duane surprised his work mates by miraculously conjuring up some bush tucker. “One of the guys said ‘you should go on this show Alone,”’ Duane recalls. After arriving home from work, he binged the first season in one sitting. He remembers thinking, “If this ever comes out in Australia, I’m gonna apply for it”.
Less than three months later, Duane got his chance.
“Women Belong Outdoors”
If surviving in the Tasmanian winter wilderness wasn’t terrifying enough, the prospect of being projected onto TV screens across the country weighed heavily on both Duane and Kate.
“I had my own thoughts like, I can’t be portrayed here as this Aboriginal man that knows everything about country because I’m still putting the pieces back together through my family history,” Duane says.
Kate had her own reservations, based on her years as a solo hiker. “Every time I go solo hiking, if I run into a man often they’ll be like, what are you doing?” Kate says. “They don’t mean it in a bad way, but sometimes it comes across like that. They’re like, ‘Are you alone? Are you on your own?’ I’ve heard story after story about women not feeling safe on their own, because when they’re out there doing it they’ve received strange comments [from men], which makes them feel once again like they don’t belong there.”
Ultimately, Kate decided to look at the Alone experience as an opportunity to push her own limits and boundaries. She also wanted to show her six month-old daughter that “women belong outdoors”.
“Doing this helped me realise that whatever you’re doing, be it a walk in the park or solo navigating around the world, as long as you’re doing something you’re proud of and you are pushing your own limits and boundaries, then good on you,” Kate says.
Duane thinks about his time on Alone whenever he gets hungry, but ultimately views his experience of being isolated in Tasmania as something he will draw on for the rest of his life.
“Just the connection to humanity that we have – I think I’d underappreciated that before the show,” Duane says. “That was a really, really big eye-opener for me. I think a lot of people in life should experience themselves getting out there on country and trying to survive.”
TV Diversity Done Right
In a 2016 study analysing representation in Australian TV dramas, Screen Australia found that the diversity of Australian society was not being reflected. Later, Media Diversity Australia released a damning report on the lack of diversity in Australian newsrooms, calling out organisations from the ABC to Nine Entertainment.
Until recently, reality TV was no different. Frustrated with being characterised as “lazy” or “aggressive”, Black alumni from US Survivor went public with stories of racial slurs being used on set by white castmates. The group would later petition showrunners to enact a diversity quota of 30 percent, but following the Black Lives Matter protests spurred by George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers, parent network CBS formally committed to a goal of 50 percent BIPOC casts in unscripted shows.
Speaking to his experience on Alone, Duane says that he was “able to be myself on the show” thanks to the control he had over the process. “If there’s any show I’m gonna be on and get to be myself, it’s Alone,” he remembers thinking before the show went into production. Following his experience on the show, he’s also optimistic about the future.
“I think it’s making a lot more Aboriginals prouder while giving them the ability to speak out and change the future of the country,” he says.
For Kate, who across her academic career has watched the Federal Government fail to make science subjects accessible and appealing for younger women, representation on Australian TV screens should be about making people feel as if they’re less, well, alone.
“I think it’s very important for [LGBTIQ+] people to see ourselves in whatever space it is,” she says. “It makes us feel like we belong.”