Gina Chick burst onto our screens and minds when she appeared on season one of Alone Australia, barefoot and swathed in a hand-made possum skin cloak that helped her survive the freezing wilderness in Lutriwita and ultimately win the mantle of the last (wo)man standing.
Steadfastly chipper and defiantly earnest, Chick won hearts across the nation because of her deep reverence for the natural world. With her toes sinking into dewy grass and muddy soil, her wavy hair snagged with twigs, she chose not to conquer the natural environment but become embedded in it, learning from First Nations practices on how to best nurture and be nurtured by the land around her.
Alone Australia winner Gina Chick on day 67 of the hit SBS series. Source: SBS
Chick planned to investigate her love for nature on the show, which traced her family’s lineage back several generations. She was delighted to discover that such an essential part of her being runs in her blood – her grandmother, Australian writer Charmian Clift (who now has a reserve named after her) was a free-range Chick like her. Her great-grandfather Sydney Clift, an engineer from England, loved the wild beach and valley that surrounded his NSW home so much that he often walked barefoot, too.
Gina Chick at Charmian Clift Reserve. Credit: SBS
But learning about family can be just as confronting as it can be moving. After all, these people – who up until now were abstract beings barely imagined in Chick’s psyche – lived a hundred years ago, amidst ongoing clearing of First Nations land and the continued expansion of colonial settlements. A tough pill to swallow for any Australian, but a particularly harrowing concept to Chick, who has dedicated her life to rewilding the bush and treading lightly on Indigenous land.
“That was one of the most devastating moments for me in the whole journey, the moment where I saw the quarry where my great grandfather had been working as an engineer, designing the systems that would take stone away from Wadi Wadi land,” she tells SBS.
“There were people living there, and my great grandfather was directly responsible, along with hundreds of other people, for the removal of that stone. When I got to that quarry, it was like a sledgehammer hit me when I saw and viscerally understood that there were people living here.
Gina Chick with Tony Gilmour at Bombo Quarry Headland, NSW. Credit: SBS
“There was an entire land formation that is now gone, and this is the direct result of colonialism, and it's not a theory anymore. This is my ancestry. I was devastated. I was completely and I still am.”
There’s an impulse to meld the colonial legacy of our forefathers with stories of their laughter, joy, and love for the bush, but Chick errs away from this thinking. Instead, she is careful not to sanitise her family’s legacy.
“It’s irreconcilable,” Chick says.
“I have to accept that there are stories in me which are about deep, profound and visceral connection to First Nation rights and First Nation sovereignty, and there are deep and profound stories within me about the coloniser who took that away. I don't think that's reconcilable. I think that is part of the tension that I will now carry with me for the rest of my days.”
This stopped being a theory and became something that I felt in my bones ...
It’s only in these contradictions that we can truly reckon with who we are – a mish mash kaleidoscope of people who, as a result of decisions good and bad, have brought us into this world. And it’s only through shining a light on this reality that we can even begin to wrestle with it.
“I am so grateful that I went on this journey for Who Do You Think You Are? so that this stopped being a theory and became something that I felt in my bones so that I can now carry that dissonance inside me,” she says.
“It's not about whitewashing it. It's not about bypassing it. It's about carrying that grief and the reality of [that] dissonance inside me that will never be right, but at least now I'm feeling it and I think that is actually part of my responsibility as a descendant of colonisers, it's part of my responsibility to feel that.
“I carry with me a tiny inkling, a tiny fragment, of the sense of the impact that my ancestor has had, and in my way, feel that grief as much as I can so that it isn't lost, so that there is something true. I can then meet my Indigenous friends and say I am sorry that my ancestor did this, and I'm sorry I'm working on stolen land. I don't have an answer, but I do feel it, and that's not enough but it's something.”
Who Do You Think You Are? airs on SBS and SBS On Demand Tuesday nights at 7.30pm. Gina Chick's episode is now available to stream on SBS On Demand, and airs at SBS on Tuesday 3 June at 7.30PM.
Gina Chick’s bestselling memoir We Are The Stars is available from Summit Books/Simon & Schuster.
