SANFL star Ben Grieger will appear on SBS series Alone Australia Series 3
With only a backpack and the bare essentials, this South Australian teacher and accomplished footballer has set himself quite the goal.
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He’s a boy from the bush who played senior football for his home club when he was 13 and then made a name for himself as one of the best defenders in the SANFL.
The quick and strong fullback grew up dreaming of playing AFL for the Crows and was a member of a Woodville-West Torrens’ 2011 SANFL premiership side and represented the state in a team that beat WA the following year.
By the time he hung up the boots a couple of years ago, Ben Grieger had clocked up 227 senior games – 100 in the SANFL and the rest at country clubs Lameroo and Loxton.
The schoolteacher, father and husband will add to his resume when he appears as a competitor in the cult SBS show Alone Australia this month. And Grieger, 38, says the discipline and mental preparation he relied on during a lifetime of playing football will serve him well in the wild Tasmanian Wilderness into which competitors in the show are dropped to test their survival skills.
“On the footy field, with everyone watching, there’s nowhere to hide and when you’re participating in an experience like Alone there’s nowhere to hide either,” he says.
“There are those opportunities all the time (in both football and Alone) to step up – are you going to step up and do the hard things or are you going to soft out … or tap out?
“There are those opportunities throughout life, particularly in sport, where that little voice in your head chimes up and says: ‘Come on mate, take the easy option, pull out of this contest or don’t do that last 1km time trial at top pace, or it’s 40 degrees, you don’t need to go for a run now, no one else will know …’
“Every single time you say to that little voice, ‘Pipe down, I’m the one driving the bus here, I’ve got work to do, I’ve got goals’, you get stronger as a person.”
He says it was a similar dynamic entering Tasmania’s West Coast Ranges for Alone. “It’s that mind-over-matter stuff,” he says. “Can you push yourself? What is your limit? Because chances are you’re going to find it. And are you going to step up in that moment or are you going to tap out?
“That’s what it comes down to, and footy was certainly pretty helpful in preparing for that.”
Grieger is one of 10 competitors in the third Australian season of Alone, a series in which competitors are dumped in a remote location with just 10 items, a swath of camera equipment and a satellite phone.
There are only three ways for contestants to return to civilisation – by voluntarily tapping out on the sat phone, being medically extracted or as the winner of the $250,000 grand prize.
There is no camera crew and each participant must document their battle to stay warm, dry, fed and alive for as long as possible.
The series was filmed last winter and the cold, wet climate is a far cry from Loxton in the Riverland, where Grieger has been a high school English teacher for the past decade or so.
He was born and bred at Lameroo, about 100km south of Loxton, where his father Andrew runs a service station and tyre repair business and mum Jocelyn is a nurse.
He ran out for his first senior football game for Lameroo when he was 13, played 38 SANFL games for West Adelaide, returned for a couple of premierships for his home club before another 62 games, including the 2011 premiership, in the SANFL for Woodville-West Torrens.
Along the way he qualified to become a secondary teacher and taught at King’s Baptist Grammar School before he and his wife Lauren moved to Loxton where they are now raising their three young children.
Grieger is an Alone “super fan” who has loved the outdoors since he was a kid, is a lifelong “fishing nutter” and spent the past few years honing his survival skills – including making a primitive deadfall trap using an encyclopaedia to catch mice under his desk at school.
Applications to appear on the first two seasons of Alone Australia were unsuccessful but his life changed when producers rang last year to let him know it was third time lucky. The devout Christian admits it was a big decision to leave Lauren and their children (twin boys aged 8 and a daughter, 4) for the show but his strong faith helped him decide it was the right call.
“Lauren and I talked about it and we knew that we’d have support from both of our families as well,” he says. “It was actually quite amazing – my mum had booked long-service leave over a year beforehand, and the long service leave she had booked started on the exact day that I flew out for this adventure.
“We really just felt that God was in it, and he had our back and was just leading us through.
“But even with reassurance it was pretty huge. I knew that it wasn’t just going to be one survival challenge with me out on the land … there was another survival challenge going on at the same time – Lauren at home with the kids being a single parent for a little while.”
And then, when he arrived in Tasmania, connecting with and being guided by God was a major part of his experience.
“And I certainly completely connected to my faith – I could feel God working in my life in cool ways and teaching me different kinds of things along the way,” he says.
“It’s such a comfort when you are alone in terms of all those other relationships just to have God there with me – it was really cool. And you are just removed from all those other distractions and the hustle and bustle and business of everyday life.
“You’re injected from that into just this beautiful part of the world and it’s quietness and solitude, and it was just a chance to hang out with God and hear from him and reflect. It was really special.”
Participants traditionally pile on as much body fat as possible before the show to sustain them out in the wild, where finding food and loneliness are the primary challenges. Grieger added about 10kg to his normal weight after “eating as if it was for Australia”, drinking litres of milk daily and even downing shots of olive oil every morning and night.
He had to keep his participation a secret until a few weeks ago but within hours of the SBS cast announcement there were dozens of promotional posters plastered around the school and the whole town is pumped for the show. He is, of course, unable to reveal how many days he lasted in the harsh Tasmanian Wilderness but says he went into the experience knowing the longevity of his stay would depend primarily on mental strength.
“I was always going to be trying to focus on my strengths – don’t over-complicate it, just try to catch some fish, build a decent shelter and try not to tap out,” he says.
“That was really my game planning in a nutshell. You know, I didn’t want to overcomplicate too much. But I knew from the get-go that really it was 95 per cent a mental battle. You hear people say that sport is 95 per cent mental and survival certainly is.
“I just tried to really project myself into the different situations and work really hard to remove tapping out as a category – remove it as an option.” ■
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