For its second season, Alone has crossed the ditch to New Zealand. But while the locale has changed, the challenges the 10 Australian contestants face haven’t.
There’s only one problem with being responsible for the biggest show your broadcast partner has ever put to air. When season two rolls around, you have to do it all again – or maybe even try to top it., the first season of which became SBS’s most successful commission in history. “It’s that second album pressure, when you don’t expect your first album to do as well as it does and then they say, ‘hey, quickly make a second album’.
The biggest change from season one – which was watched by an average 1.24 million viewers per episode last year – is the location. This time the 10 contenders were dropped in the wilds of New Zealand’s South Island, with only minimal equipment and no supplies as they tried to stay out there the longest, and to collect the $250,000 prize.
Petersen knows his way around a survival challenge; he teaches bushcraft and survival skills, and his TikTok videos – in which he demonstrates handy tricks such as how to have fire first thing in the morning with the help of an upturned wok, or how to make soap out of leaves – have garnered him more than 170,000 followers.
The key to survival in such conditions, says Petersen, is preparedness. That meant finding kindling and timber before retiring for the night, and sometimes curling up with it in his sleeping bag in order to make sure it was dry enough to burn the next day. “My accountability and my ethics and morals now are a lot stronger than they would have been then,” he says. “I probably would have been tempted to cross boundaries years ago; I guess I could turn cameras off but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about recording everything in your own integrity. And I feel very comfortable with the way I conducted myself.”