How it feels to leave Alone Australia: The Landing.

Gina Chick shares what it's like to be extracted from her nest-home in lutruwita after winning Alone Australia.

Dawn light steals under my eyelashes to melt the sleep shroud from my nascent vision. I’m warm from the inside out. My bones have melted. The bed is soft the way puppies and kittens are soft. It’s like sleeping in a cloud, my first true sleep in ten weeks. I left the window open so I could hear night noises and feel air moving. A bird I do not know carolled for hours. I dreamed I had the camera in the wrong position to film my sleeping face and fumbled around half awake to find it.

There is no camera. 

That part is done.

I won. It’s all too huge to digest so I nibble at it in tiny morsels. If I whisper the words, they don’t seem so crazy.

‘Holy crap, I won.’

This bed, this house, scrubbing off layers of skin in the bath last night, the interminable road trip yesterday through endless horrendous bends and twists from the west coast to Hobart, plates of hot food metered out from locked boxes so I don’t die from sudden overfeeding, beaming faces congratulating me every step of the way… it’s all surreal. My hair is now soft, not matted filthy straw, and the black stains are mostly gone from my hands. After the bath I lathered my skin with moisturiser, which it drank like a thirsty beast. Softness and comfort everywhere. White sheets whicker gently of rest. Clean clothes sing of sunshine and relief. The possum coat has been relegated to an airing rack in the garage, banished from the house. Apparently, it’s a bit whiffy, smells like a binfire. 

I don’t really know where I am. I’ve gone from utterly self-reliant to completely dependent in an eyeblink, from uncomfortable and awake to comfortable and half asleep. I’m in the softest cage imaginable. I know how flowers feel after the gardener shears their stems and drops them into some beautiful vase in a window. I already miss dirt.

This is the second morning since I was extracted. It’s an appropriate word. You have to be embedded to be extracted and I was. Am.

Extracted. Like a tooth pried from a jaw, bloody at the root. Those nerve endings don’t hurt until the air hits them. Then they scream blue murder. 

I guess I’m not hurting yet because although I’ve been physically removed, not all of me made it out. Just the bits you can see. My soul is still buried to the roots in wet green moss, enmeshed to the eyeballs in dark myrtles and eerie crawling fingerlings of mist. Its filigree net wraps around looming ghosts of murdered trees and spans the lake to the enormous stringybark glowing pure gold as the sun goes down, sewing the last liquid silks of sunshine into a shimmering coat of living light. It shivers as wallabies thump and quolls scream and devils screech horrific war cries. Eel and trout slide through its watery deepspaces. 

It’s making more connections, not less.

This is a curious feeling, tracking my soul still out there revelling in the nowhere places. Lying in white sheets I’m making dirty just by breathing onto them, surrounded by everyday mundane miracles of the most ordinary kind, while in larila bay, dancing in palawa footprints, an invisible part of me deepens its conversation with country as if I never left.

I say I’m not sure how it all happened but that’s not true. 

I know exactly how. 

I fell in love with the land so hard it loved me back. I lay myself across it like a carpet until moss grew through my skin and the lake wept with my eyes and the mud merged with my hands. 

The land and I made each other promises. I gave myself to it more deeply than any lover. I surrendered my humanity to allow the animal in me to understand its low rasping song. It dissolved me entirely then re-grew me as another dewdrop in its vast jewelled web, no more or less important than fish or fern or cloud. It stretched me beyond my human skin, sent me spinning into spaces of slow time and old wisdom. It plugged me into libraries of information beyond the ken of my rational mind, which gave up somewhere along the way and contented itself with working the cameras and having my t-shirt on the right way and making sure I was mostly coherent when it was time to use words.

My soul is still there because it potentiated. The infinite fractal cilia wafting at its edges grew outward from a seed into something else, something muscly and powerful and vital. Wherever it stretched it made connections and those connections made connections. You can’t control that kind of dazzling chaos once it starts metastasising. From me to we and from we to us and from us to all and from all to one final ringing note that is the entire orchestra pounding on the abyssal door to the universe and the universe answering with a silence so perfect it’s deafening. 

I died and was regrown so completely that my soul thinks it’s a nature/human hybrid. I know without knowing that this is how my ancestors did it, how the ancient ones navigated by stars and found fresh water and game and learned how to live. Always porous at their edges, with no hard boundaries, letting the land colonise them, show them how to be. No travel faster than a walk so new connections grew along the way as they mapped trails and explored territory. Always this two-way conversation between earth heart and human heart. 

We didn’t invent the internet; we just remembered and remade it outside our bodies. It lives already inside our DNA, in our oldest memories of soul-connection with place. We’re lonely creatures because we crave what we’ve lost, the infinite nourishment that comes when you’re part of a living network, fed by the super-sustaining battery of symbiosis with country.

For most of the 350,000 years of our hunter gatherer history we danced in balance with our world. Back when we lived as wild creatures do, in relationship with every single thing around us, because to disconnect from place is to die cold and afraid and motherless.

Until our big, wonderful brains grew too noisy and we forgot how to listen to frog song and understand the words, forgot how to call clouds and squeeze them for rain, forgot how to yearn for what we need and have Big Mama answer our prayers. Until the only thing we could hear was the hollow, magnified echo of our own importance rattling in our skulls instead of the ecstatic chorus of global synapses firing as we plugged in to an intelligent, aware, awake planet hanging impossibly in space like the fucking miracle it is, looking after us because it needs balance and we’re part of that balance, except we’ve forgotten that too. 

I was extracted too fast. I haven’t mapped the journey out, and my soul couldn’t grow fast enough to stay with me.

I am soul-lagged.

There’s no sound in the house yet, just my soft breath tickling motes of dust into dancing smoke.  Outside, an early magpie chick wheezes in the universal cry for food all mothers know. The mother in me still responds viscerally to that tug.

She’s in bed with me, of course, this morning. Starfish hands curled, hair a tangle of titian knots, skin translucent under the kiss of first light. My soul may still be out there in the wild green, but she followed me back, eyes alight with wonder, arms full of treasures; feathers from Zazou the fantail, wallaby vertebrae strung into necklaces, woven twigs of myrtle beech. Maybe she will stay a while, to remind me how deep and wide I am, how many parts of me died such beautiful deaths in my 67 days in the wilderness. We went in together, she and I, and we’ll do this next part together, whatever it is. 

The dream of lutruwita is already starting to fade, the heartsong of the palawa drops to faint wisps of melody, nonetheless the parts my mind forgets my body never will. I am forever changed. The Gina who went in isn’t the Gina who has come out. I don’t quite know who she is yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out, with Blaise at my side; my beautiful, beautiful ghost.

With endless thanks to sbs for their support, and for printing this piece on sbs online. https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2023/05/25/i-am-forever-changed-winning-alone-australia-guest-column