Put whatever you’re doing down, says Alice Hampson, because I need to tell you the extraordinary story of Gina Chick. Her outlook on life is inspiring and – perhaps life-changing – and the story of how she got here, is wild, heartbreaking and wonderful.
In the space of a week I went from never having heard the name Gina Chick, to saying her name and telling her story to virtually every single person I crossed paths with. After speaking to the 54-year-old Aussie last week, I can say she is easily one of the most incredible and inspiring women I’ve ever talked to.
Gina won a completely insane reality TV show and has written a book that comes out this month and we will get to all of that, but first we have to talk about the most important part of her story – the stuff that happened before those accomplishments. Because it was before she went on a crazy survival show that she’d already been tested to her absolute limits and beyond, building an incredible sense of fortitude, internal determination and peace that’s second to none.
Growing up in Australia, Gina had an affinity with the bush and Mother Nature from an early age. She went on to attend courses and retreats to learn about living off the land, survival and being at one with the natural environment. On one of those courses she met her husband – he was 12 years her junior and she was surprised and overjoyed when at 40 she was pregnant. Life was good – the two of them were running different ‘rewilding’ and nature-based courses and retreats.
“Nature teaches who and what we really are,” says Gina. “We’re built from nature – nature’s actually inside. Our bodies know how to connect with that big battery power of Mother Nature – we just have to let them and give them the opportunity.”
The joy of that time in her life was short-lived though – Gina was soon diagnosed with breast cancer and advised to end the pregnancy. She was warned that by the time she delivered her baby, it may be too late to fight the cancer. But instead, Gina found a new doctor who would safely treat the cancer, whilst she got ready to meet their daughter. It was a success – she delivered a very healthy little girl, and was also in remission from cancer.
But tragically, that’s not where her cancer story ends. Nearly three years after her baby, Blaise, was born, Gina found a lump in her young daughter’s stomach. She knew instantly in her bones that it was cancer. They fought hard, but in a short amount of time their treasured little flame-haired girl had passed away. Gina and her husband were bereft.
But as they mourned their loss, Gina also wanted to see her husband have the chance to be a father again. After miscarriages and more heartaches though, the writing was on the wall – she could see it was no longer possible for her to have children. So, she did the most loving thing imaginable – she set her husband free to see out his dream. She even encouraged him into a new relationship – a woman who is now his wife, and the mother of his two children. Gina has remained a close friend to him, and has become a close friend of his wife – in fact, she is the godmother to their two young girls.
“We didn’t say ‘till death do us part in our vows,” she says. “The agreement was to support each other in our soul journeys, whatever that might be.”
Gina has seen the depths of hell – having lived every parent’s worst nightmare – but walked away with a mental fortitude that has made her a force to be reckoned with. Yes, losing her only child has torn her heart open and caused her immense grief, but it hasn’t hardened her, made her cold or cynical or afraid. Remarkably, it has enriched her and those around her in very unexpected and beautiful ways.
“His purpose is having kids, so I let him go. And as a result I have this incredible friend”
Gina’s fortitude and resilience came to the fore last year when she won Alone Australia (it’s available to watch free now on TVNZ+). If you’ve never heard of the show, essentially 10 people are dropped into the wilderness, far away from one another in winter. There’s no shelter, no food, no water – and they must live in solitude. Whoever can survive the longest, wins.
Of course, at the start, Gina wasn’t looked at as someone who might go the distance. She came across pretty woo-woo – dancing around barefoot (Gina virtually never wears shoes anymore – even on a red carpet!). And instead of taking a sleeping bag like everyone else on the show (and everyone else who has ever won the show), she stitched together a cloak of possum skins.
But very quickly into the show, it becomes clear that as much as the challenge is a physical one, even more so it is a complete test of the mind. Which is why anyone who had met Gina – including one of her best friends, Hugh Jackman – knew that Gina had it in the bag.
“You’re right in saying it’s a bonkers thing to do,” she says. “I’ve got to say though, I loved it. I really did. I loved it. I’m not saying it was easy, but I didn’t just survive, I thrived. I had a ball.”
Her hope was to become the first woman to ever do it – but she was pipped at the post by a Swedish woman shortly before filming began. But still, she became the second female ever to win the show, winning at 67 days after the only other contestant still standing was pulled from the show by the medical team. Gina couldn’t believe it was over – she felt like she was only just getting started.
One of the things that helped, obviously, was how at home Gina was in the wilderness – in part, because she had spent so much time in it. For many years she has taught ‘rewilding’, particularly to women.
“It’s basically been about helping people be at home in the wilderness, and for me that means the wilderness inside and sell as the wilderness outside,” she says. “I’ve spent a lot of time learning tools and skill of emotional processes to work through whatever is going on in the inside. Because, the stuff that is on the inside is way scarier than the stuff outside. You take people out and put them on their own in the wilderness and the thing that’s going to actually drive them out is nothing really from the external environment, it’s all the stuff that’s going on in the inside that’s never been looked at and now you have nowhere to hide from it all.”
The Realities of Grief
Gina wore her heart on her sleeve during Alone Australia – she showed what grief looks like, even many years later, doing a little ritual by the fire and crying, really crying, on her daughter’s birthday.
She also talks all about it in her book, and what she’s learned from the experience – how now, her heart is even more wide open than before, even though it’s experienced such agony.
We’ve become a society that pathologises discomfort, says Gina. When we feel it, we’ve become accustomed (and encouraged!) to numb it – often by a distraction, whether that’s alcohol, doom scrolling or sex.
But in life there’s one great big discomfort that comes for all of us at one stage, or many stages in our lives: grief. And numbing the pain of it will only get us so far. Gina says part of the problem is how we approach grief as a whole in Western societies.
“Western culture has sterilised our conversations and our rituals about grief,” she says. “When I look to First Nations people, indigenous people, hunter gatherer people, there are some very, very healthy tools, rituals and ceremonies for grief and loss, so that we can process what everybody is going to go through.”
Because, grief is something that will affect us in a number of different ways in our lives, says Gina. “We are all going to lose everything we know, everyone we know and it’s not just the physical things we’re going to lose as women,” she says. “We’re going to lose our youth. We’re going to lose our ability to reproduce. We’re going to watch collagen just fall out of our bodies in a very short period of time when we go through menopause. We’re going to lose relationships, we’re going to lose our parents, we’re going to lose houses, we’re going to lose jobs, our children, our kids. So loss is a constant, for as long as we are alive.”
Yet, despite it being a constant, when it comes to grief, we’re pretty terrible at talking about it – or even knowing what to say to each other about it at times. So often, we just say: “I’m so sorry for your loss”.
“That’s where we need to have better conversations around grief,” she says. “To have conversations about how that thing that we loved so much is now a territory of rawness inside us. Where we can have rituals where we can ceremonially let go, not just one, but many, many times. I have had to let go of my daughter again and again and again. So there might be something after a week, and then a month, and then six months and then a year and so on.”
“The size of our grief, is the size of our love for that which was lost. When we live and exist in a very heartfelt way, then the grief is going to be very big. It’s going to be all-consuming a lot of the time.”
For Gina, she’s realised that those rituals can be ones she can create herself – lighting a fire, throwing some leaves into it, saying some words, or lighting a candle and creating a little ritual. “I think we are absolutely we’re geared around ceremony in our in our hearts, and in our souls. And so when we bring in the rituals, the ceremonial language about loss and grief, what we’re doing is we’re connecting with that wisdom that has kept us going for hundreds and thousands of years, and it gives us a language, a rich language of connection to be able to make sense of the cycles of our lives. Because everything is going to die – all of those little deaths are leading to the big one. And as long as we can keep in sort of dynamic conversation about those little losses, we are actually creating a life where we can face our own mortality, and if we do that, we are fully alive.”
But there’s one thing Gina knows for sure about grief, it’s this: “grief is the flip side of the coin of love,” she says. “The size of our grief, is the size of our love for that which was lost. When we live and exist in a very heartfelt way, then the grief is going to be very big. It’s going to be all-consuming a lot of the time.”
When you love that big, and then lose it, you could so easily become hardened – and vow to never love again, so as to never risk feeling so utterly bereft again. When I say this to Gina, she thinks about it and says that actually, that isn’t wrong.
“There’s this idea – especially in New Age communities – that you just have to keep your heart open,” she says. “But if you’ve ever seen flowers at night, a flower will close up a petals and then when the sun comes, it’ll open them up again. And this is what the heart does, in all its wisdom – when there’s too much going on, too much information, too much overwhelm, a heart will take its petals in to digest what’s going on, and then when its ready, it’ll open them again.”
Gina says there is a beautiful wisdom in listening to the rhythm of our own hearts – no one else can tell us what we want, or need. We have to listen to our own hearts – and that means, sometimes protecting ourselves.
“That’s why for some people grief can look like going out and getting absolutely hammered every Friday night,” she says. “Some people go numb for a long time because the heart is saying, this is too much. Until the day when suddenly, you can feel something – you hear a song, you smell something and those petals start to come down. One of the things I’ve really learned about grief is that everyone has their own rhythm, and we’ll get there bit by bit – morsel by morsel. You eat the elephant one bite at a time.”
Forging a new relationship with her ex-husband
The story of how Gina and her ex-husband Lee so lovingly ended their marriage is such a beautiful one. But, in reality, how on earth does one actually go about doing what she did?
For a start, says Gina, it’s been a long time now and their relationship has really evolved, but it wasn’t without a lot of hurt and sadness along the way. But, one of the keys she says, was in the vows they made at their wedding.
“There were no promises in our vows, because the Gina that was making those promises wasn’t going to be the Gina that had to keep those vows – we all change,” she says. “I realised I couldn’t promise him ‘til death do us part’ because that would be like saying, don’t change.”
Instead, the pair promised to commit to each other helping one another on their individual journeys, whatever they may be and however they may shift and grow over time.
“So, after I knew I couldn’t have any more children, Lee desperately wanted to be a dad again,” she says. “I didn’t want to stop him from that, because he was a great dad – he is a great dad. It was horrible and it was hard and it was hurtful, but also, I have so much love for him. I want him to have whatever it is that is the thing he desperately needs in his life. His purpose is having kids, so I let him go. And as a result I have this incredible friend, and we’ve run programs together and business together. So when it came time on Alone Australia to choose a loved one to come into the bush to tell me I’d won, he was that person. Because we’ve been to the bottom of the pit together, and we have experienced things as a couple that most never do. And I love him, and he’s my friend.”
We Are The Stars, by Gina Chick ($41.99, Harper Collins) is out now