The Alone Australia star features on the cover of the Flame's November 2024 print edition. To read the magazine layout, click here, download a program here or find the text by True Story artistic director Caroline Baum below.
Even people who did not watch Alone Australia on SBS know Gina Chick – she’s become one of those rare figures who transcends the television show that propelled her into the public sphere. That’s down to her off-the-scale charisma, a degree of luminosity that is 100 percent natural, a dramatic phenomenon like a live volcano, or a magical snowstorm.
Somehow, the source of her energy is never depleted, even by a punishing promotional schedule for her first book, We Are the Stars, as well as appearances at the Logies (barefoot, of course, her trademark).
“My degree of neurodiversity means that I just can’t do small talk,” she says to me on the phone, in a short gap between events. “I go straight to the nub of the conversation. I made a vow of veracity on Alone, of not editing anything of myself, of sharing my grief storm (over the loss of her daughter Blaise at the age of three to cancer). Thing is, once you have shown your innards, people launch right in.
“What I have discovered is that my introversion is nourished by this amazing experience of meeting so many people. I’m good at setting boundaries, for starters: I’m either totally available or I take myself away for a bit, so that what is public is profound and deep. It does require courage, but I have the capacity and it’s such a privilege.”
It seems only right for Gina to bring her magic to True Story 2024, the third festival of creative non-fiction at Coledale Community Hall, as hers is such a remarkable combination of grief, loss, recovery, superior survival skills, and New Age goddess wisdom. Besides, she’s also almost local, a South Coaster who lives near Jervis Bay.
Gina’s earthy, practical and, yes, slightly woo-woo vibe jumped off the screen in the first episode of Alone Australia, as she danced for joy on her little patch of bleak Tasmanian wilderness in her possum fur cloak, made under the instruction of a regular True Story guest, Dr Jodi Edwards. No other contestant was able to make the wilderness feel like home the way she did – even going so far as to thatch a door out of local grasses to keep the warmth of her fire in her hut.
Since then, she’s spent more time in hotel rooms around the world than at home. There’s also been a spontaneous pilgrimage to the island of Hydra, where her grandmother Charmian Clift (whom True Story honours with a doco as part of the program) lived in a bohemian crowd that included Leonard Cohen.
“I never chased up her story as I didn’t want her voice in my head. I had not read a word of her. Honestly. And then I went there and I just could not find her, not any real trace. Until the last day, when I found the taverna where she hung out with Leonard and the others and it was like being struck by lightning and I sang there, I wept there and hung on to that feeling to channel it into the book.”
The genetic imprint is undeniable: those cheekbones, those lips. But also that sense of freedom, that curiosity, that open-hearted expansive embrace of the natural and the human, wherever and however they collide.
Trust Gina to reject the convention and to write her memoir as if it were fiction, including dialogue.
“I have synaesthesia, so when I write it’s a multi-sensorial experience and I just fall into it and live it, so it’s written in the present tense.”
A second book is underway, and there is a cascade of others, including for children, in that gorgeous busy brain of hers.
She admits that the current schedule of planes, airports and hotels is unfamiliar, along with the degree of attention and interest. “The most distracting part of it is social media,” she confesses. “I want to share, but don’t want it all to be about me, and navigating that is a balancing act I am still learning.”
Seemingly fearless, she admits there are two things that scare her. “The first is any kind of improv, like Theatresports, that’s my idea of hell.
“The other is the messiness of the body failing in death. Like my dad, I don’t feel pain, I am really just scar tissue held together with willpower, but the primal grasping at life when it is failing is another matter…”
A veteran of Mardi Gras, with more than her fair share of sequins in her wardrobe, she is enjoying the transformational dress-up aspect of photo shoots, “not just because it allows me to drag out my vintage couture to become Cinderella,” she says, “but because I can insist on not being photo-shopped or airbrushed. This platform gives me the opportunity for connection and to show what it looks like to be a 55-year-old woman with leg fat.”
Just don’t ask her to wear shoes.
Gina Chick will be in conversation with artistic director Caroline Baum at True Story festival at 2.30pm on Sunday, Nov 17 at Coledale Community Hall. Tickets at southcoastwriters.org