How this hit show ensures contestants are ‘truly alone’

No matter how charismatic, inventive or resilient the contestants on Alone might be, there’s always a standout star: the location. Or rather 10 locations, in which the contestants find themselves trying to survive. But how exactly are they chosen?

“It’s a long process, and it’s a very time-consuming process, to put this show together,” says Riima Daher, executive producer of Alone Australia’s three seasons. “Thoughts of the next location, to be honest, are happening halfway through a season.

“While I’m still on the ground with the cast, mid-series, we’re already having thoughts about where the next season will be … As soon as the winner has gone home, I have about a week off, and then I’m back into it.

“It’s very important that the participants remain uninterrupted and truly alone,” says the show’s bushcraft consultant Gordon Dedman, a former army commando who now teaches survival skills and works as an outdoor guide in the Northern Territory. “We rely heavily on natural features such as rivers, cliffs, mountains, inaccessible ridge lines to create naturally occurring boundaries and buffers.

“These need to be inaccessible in order to make it impossible for participants to accidentally roam into each other,” he adds. “That’s one of the critical jobs of the reconnaissance mission.”

Daher is the principal location scout for the show, and travelled extensively throughout Tasmania’s wilderness areas for season one, and New Zealand’s South Island for season two.

“I visited every single lake on that South Island, and I can say almost the same thing of Tasmania,” she says. “I had seen a lot of it for season one, so for this season I looked at about five lakes before we decided on the one that we ended up with.”

Officially, the location is given in the show merely as the West Coast Ranges of Lutruwita (Tasmania). But a little online sleuthing reveals it to be Lake Burbury, near Queenstown.

Locations need to be able to provide contestants with food and the materials to build shelter.Credit: SBS

Proximity to medical facilities and a town capable of supporting a crew is essential. If a contestant is injured, the production needs to be able to get to them quickly.

“I need to make sure we can reach everyone within an acceptable timeframe for our safety officer,” says Daher. “And when you’ve got distances like 56 kilometres [the maximum spread between contestants this season], it’s a tight scenario.”

The comfort zone varies from site to site, but Daher says it can take “a couple of hours” to get help to the location in case of emergency. “Which is why it’s really important that we teach the contestants first aid, so they can triage themselves until we can get there.”

But finding a suitable location is just the beginning of the journey. From there, says Daher, “there are three sets of permissions that I generally seek. Permission from the land itself: is it welcoming geographically, does it offer the resources that we need for this experiment to work? Cultural permissions – that means consultation with First Nations people, finding out who that land belongs to, or who belongs to that land, depending on where you are and how that First Nations group identifies with that land. And once we have that, we move into legal permission – finding out whether the land is public or private, what you can and can’t do on that land.”

There’s a title card at the end of each episode in season 3 that gives a little hint about some of the negotiations that take place, specifically around hunting. It reads: “Specific exemptions from environmental and wildlife legislation have been provided by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania as well as the Inland Fisheries Service to enable activities that would otherwise be illegal in Tasmania.”

As series producer, Riima Daher is responsible for scouting the locations for Alone Australia, which in season 3 was once again shot in south-west Tasmania. Credit: SBS

Apart from kangaroo and some wallaby species, killing Australian native animals is largely prohibited. And that makes for a survivalist’s nightmare.

“Generally, all traps need to be live animal traps so as to be able to release any protected animals accidentally caught,” explains Dedman. “This can be very challenging and forces experienced hunters to abandon their signature tried-and-true methodology altogether. They have to think about trapping in a completely different, and often less efficient and less effective way.

Gordon Dedman, a former army commando, is responsible for assessing the suitability of locations from a survival perspective.Credit: SBS

“In New Zealand [season 2], for example, the bow and arrow was not permitted for use after sunset and before sunrise – and that’s when the possums are most active, so you can imagine how challenging that can be. But that law exists for the safety of humans – you don’t want to be the recipient of a rogue arrow at night because a hunter couldn’t see you – so it’s an important responsibility of the show to advertise the restrictions for the sake of community awareness and education.

“Frustrations aside, at all times the welfare of all animals is of utmost importance,” he adds. “It’s the priority for everyone involved, and the taking of life of permitted animals is done in the most humane and respectful manner. I’m proud of that.”

Of course, the mere presence of potential game is a critical requirement. So, too, is ensuring each contestant has access to the same potential supplies of food, water and material for shelter.

“No two pockets of land are ever the same – that’s nature for you – so there is always going to be some ecological variation between sites that can’t be avoided,” says Dedman. “What we aim for instead is relative parity between each of the sites.

“Parity doesn’t mean that you have exactly the same – it’s physically impossible,” adds Daher. “It just means one person might have more of something than another, but on balance, they’re fair.”

It’s important to be able to get to contestants, and to get them out, quickly in case of a medical emergency. Credit: SBS

Wherever they end up, though, one thing’s for sure: no one on Alone will put on weight.

“Periods of starvation and hunger are completely natural and normal in a hunter-gatherer society,” says Dedman. “There are very few people alive today who have the depth of knowledge and skill to be able to thrive off the land indefinitely like our ancestors did, simply because those skills are not needed as much anymore, so we’ve discarded them, forgotten them.”

And how would he do if it came to it?

“I think I might do OK on the survival front, but you’ve got Buckley’s of getting any usable camera or audio content from me,” he says. “I can barely operate my phone.”

Alone Australia is on SBS and SBS On Demand now.

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