Alone Australia

The contestants suffer just the right amount of solitude and deprivation: enough to make them change their minds without losing them.

In 1992, at the age of 24, McCandless – who was a big Thoreau fan – made a gutsy attempt to opt out of modern American society. “We’re all just passing through for a short time,” he said, in one of the great Alone exit speeches, “and the stuff that we have all this anxiety and drama about, and argue over, means nothing. There was a similar kind of stoic heroism in the story of Christopher McCandless, first told in Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild (1996). When a series of Alone enters the home straight, people start having revelations like that. A guy in the first American series lost his ferro rod for good after making the mistake of putting it down on a log, in a landscape consisting of nothing but logs. In the first episode of Alone Australia, a contestant briefly misplaces her ferro rod before deciding to tuck it permanently into her bra. There he resolved “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life”. In 1913, a year after Robert Falcon Scott led his doomed expedition to the South Pole, his posthumously published Diaries became a bestseller. Fans of the original show will be happy to hear that Alone Australia sticks closely to the classic format, and revisits many long-standing Alone themes. For example, there is the critical importance of the spark-producing device known as the ferro rod. Gage was packing explosive into a rock with a pointed metre-long rod called a tamping iron when a stray spark caused the charge to blow prematurely. In 1848, an unfortunate American named Phineas Gage had a nasty accident while overseeing the construction of a railroad in Vermont.