Who Is Rick J. Petersen from Alone Australia Season 2? What Happened

Spoiler note: this covers how Rick J. Petersen's Alone Australia season 2 run ended.

Rick J. Petersen was 58 when he joined the cast of Alone Australia season 2, filmed in Fiordland on New Zealand's South Island despite the show's Australian branding. He came in from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, with a resume most contestants can't match: a former SAS soldier turned survival educator, the kind of background the show tends to cast because it photographs as immediately credible.

That credibility carried him to a solid mid-pack finish. Petersen placed 5th out of 10 on his contestant page, lasting 38 days before tapping out because he missed his family. Season 2 was won by Krzysztof Wojtkowski at day 64, with runner-up Suzan Muir just one day behind at 63 (she later revealed heart issues at the reunion) and third-place Andreas Lundin going 57 days before stepping back after losing 30% of his body weight. Petersen's 38 days put him well ahead of the season's back half, where four contestants didn't make it past day 16.

The normalized data for this season doesn't carry a sourced gear list for Petersen, so there's no verified item-by-item breakdown of his kit to compare against castmates. What's on record is straightforward: no medical evacuation, no equipment failure, just a voluntary exit driven by homesickness after five and a half weeks of isolation, a common enough reason on a show that selects for skill but can't select for how someone will handle missing their kids or partner.

Before and after the show

Petersen's path to Alone ran through the military first. He joined at 17 and later moved into the SAS, where he spent more than eight years training in extreme survival environments, including snow and ice mountain warfare. That background is a large part of why he reads as one of the more technically sound contestants in the season's cast, even though his run ended for personal reasons rather than a skills gap.

As of mid-2026, reporting indicates Petersen has built a public-facing survival education career since the show. He runs a bushcraft and survival school with a particular focus on bringing fathers and sons together through shared outdoor learning, a theme that echoes the family pull that ended his own run. He has also become an unlikely social media figure, with a TikTok following in the hundreds of thousands who refer to themselves as his "Bushtokkers," and he has spoken publicly about finding calm in nature after a career built around high-stress military service.

How his run compares

Petersen's day 38 sits in a season where the gap between the frontrunners and the mid-pack was unusually wide. Wojtkowski, Muir, and Lundin all cleared 57 days, while Petersen and the four contestants below him all came in under 40. That split is one of the clearer examples in the franchise of how physical conditioning and technical skill (which Petersen clearly had) can still lose out to the simple pull of wanting to go home to family, a factor the show can't screen for in casting.

For the full order of finish and location details, our Alone Australia season 2 page has the complete cast breakdown. If you want to see how Australian seasons compare to the US version's format and rules, our Alone rules page covers the tap-out and medical evacuation criteria that decide most contestants' exits, Petersen's included.