Who Won Alone Australia Season 1? Gina Chick's Win, Explained

Spoiler note: this covers who won Alone Australia season 1.

Gina Chick won the first season of Alone Australia, lasting 67 days in the South West Tasmania wilderness to take the $250,000 AUD prize. A 52-year-old rewilding facilitator from New South Wales, she outlasted nine other contestants and became the first-ever Alone Australia champion, per our season 1 page. The season ran 11 episodes from March to May 2023, and Tasmania's cold, wet temperate rainforest set the tone for a franchise that would go on to film in New Zealand, South Africa, and the Canadian Arctic in later seasons.

How the win happened

Chick reached the final two alongside solo adventurist Mike Atkinson, and for most of the back half of the season it looked like a genuine two-way race rather than a runaway. The deciding factor wasn't a dramatic tap-out; it was a medical check. Atkinson was pulled on day 64 after his blood pressure and body condition dropped to levels producers couldn't let him continue past, a routine safeguard rather than his own choice. Chick kept going another three days, and after passing her own medical check on day 67, her best friend Lee arrived at her camp to tell her she had won.

That detail matters for how you read the season: Chick didn't out-hunt or out-build anyone in a flashy way. She simply stayed physically capable longer than the field, which is exactly the kind of win the show's medical-evacuation rule is designed to produce once two contestants are both still standing late. You can read more about how that rule works on our alone-rules page. At 52, she was also the oldest contestant in the cast and remains the second woman to win any version of the Alone franchise worldwide.

The rest of the field fell away much earlier. Third-placed Michael Wallace tapped out at day 32, and the bottom half of the cast, Peter Athanassiou, Jimmy Lassaline, Beck Henog, and Rob Kelly, were all gone inside the first two weeks. That steep early drop-off is part of why Chick and Atkinson's late-season pace felt like its own separate contest once episode 8 or so rolled around, a two-person race for physical endurance rather than a ten-way field.

Key gear

Chick's 10-item loadout leaned toward steady, sustainable resource management rather than one big-ticket item. Her confirmed kit included an axe, saw, and ferro rod for fire and shelter work, a fishing kit and snare wire for food, a pot for cooking, a multitool, paracord, and a 3-pound salt block, a genuinely unusual choice that let her preserve meat and fish over a 67-day stretch rather than relying purely on fresh catches. Nine of these ten items are confirmed across independent sources; the tenth is disputed between rations and a bow and arrows, so we're flagging that instead of guessing. Notably, a sleeping bag isn't among her confirmed items, unusual for a season filmed heading into the Tasmanian autumn and winter shoulder season. Her snare wire and fishing kit did the steady work of keeping her fed for over two months without a single big-game kill driving the run.

Season snapshot

Placement	Contestant	Days lasted
1st (winner)	Gina Chick	67
2nd	Mike Atkinson	64
3rd	Michael Wallace	32

For the full story of what she's done since the win, including the memoir and survival camps that followed, see where Gina Chick is now. Her contestant page has the complete gear breakdown and bio, and our winners page rounds up every champion across the whole franchise if you want to compare her run to the rest of the field.