I don’t enjoy watching innocent people suffer, but one exception is the show Alone Australia. Victims put their hands up to be left on a remote and desolate beach, hoping not to freeze to death, and if they’re lucky they may catch an eel and eat it raw. Needless to say this is my idea of torture. In my view, the $250,000 prize means nothing in the face of not having a warm shower with an elaborate selection of nice-smelling oils for more than one day.
The contestants are left utterly alone with a lot of camera equipment and film themselves building shelters, fishing or losing the plot entirely.
Most of the contestants have a horrible time and, while I enjoy having a large variety of breakdowns available for my viewing pleasure on free-to-air TV, it’s often hard to watch. Recently a contestant walked away from his camp in the Arctic and couldn’t be found for hours, which doesn’t bear thinking about. I hope he’s somewhere warm with plumbing now!
One element of the show that I can’t help but appreciate is how wholesome some of the breakdowns can be. Several contestants clearly ache for their partner or sit cold and alone (aside from the eels) contemplating why on earth they are away from their families with their short time allotted on this Earth. It’s infrequent that folks pick up the phone to tap out because of the rain, wet socks or giving themselves food poisoning after attempting some gathering without the aid of ChatGPT. Instead, you see a thought start to percolate in their heads, swirl around and grow to a roar until they pick up the walkie-talkie and tap out.
It’s in the name, but the “alone” part seems to be even harder for most contestants than the physically surviving in unbearable conditions with a few fish hooks and a flint part.
As a self-confessed wouldn’t-leave-the-airport-lounge spectator of Alone, it does draw into stark relief how odd it is for the folks who put their hands up for this. Folks who can fashion a spear, aren’t repulsed by eels, who can make fire, are comfortable sleeping outdoors on ferns and can single handedly construct a shelter. These skills, while technically essential to our very survival, are now utterly fringe behaviours. It’s quite strange to want to kill, skin and eat a possum. The distance between all of us needing to be closely connected to nature, to the food we eat, the shelter we enjoy, couldn’t seem more distant from this humble writer’s point of view.
It seems very difficult, very cold and very uncomfortable. Kill me quickly rather than any of that.
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I once saw a contestant on Alone bring her saucepan to a lake and take a long, deep, unfiltered drink of raw water. Is this how our ancestors lived? If so, would they want us doing so on TV when we have since invented zip taps? What crimes would our ancestors have committed for a memory foam mattress?
I suppose there is nothing more natural than wanting to source your own food or build your own shelter. We’ve ended up in a world where bananas are wrapped in plastic and there’s casual excess wherever we look, with tropical fruits rotting in fridges out of season after being shipped across the world. This isn’t right. Foraging, now that seems like the ticket. What could be more natural, or time-consuming.
For millennia we eked a living out of the land and now the utter basics are a distant memory and several YouTube videos away from most of us. Utterly basic knowledge about what plants are supposed to grow where we live needs to be explained to us by the kindly people on Gardening Australia.
It’s illustrative that watching people going out bush, digging up worms for bait to hopefully catch a fish a week – this is entertainment. Like the astronauts beaming back to Earth the strange and unfamiliar life on a space station. This is how it feels watching folks boil and eat palm fronds or make themselves eat foul fungus, making optimistic calculations about how many calories could be contained in the glutenous muck.
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But there is something charming about the everyday people that put their hands up for this madness. Their familiar accents, their reasons for volunteering, usually to make their family proud, to pay for something important or prove something to themselves. I’m glad they’re filming it, because I’d sooner drink the eel-ridden raw lake water than put my hand up myself.
