Alone Australia Left the Southern Hemisphere

The Australian edition premiered its fourth season on SBS on July 15 and is still running weekly. For the first time the show left the Southern Hemisphere entirely, trading Tasmania and Fiordland for the far north of Sapmi, the Indigenous Sami homeland in Finland, and a Northern Hemisphere winter of deep snow, frozen lakes and subzero cold.

Ten participants compete for $250,000 on the same last-person-standing format. Producers billed it as the hardest season the Australian version has attempted, and noted before the premiere that some of the cast had never seen snow. The predator list changes accordingly: bears and moose rather than anything native to home.

Cold has done most of the eliminating. One competitor with an existing frostbite injury was pulled by medical staff after 28 days when symptoms returned. Another, a hiking guide originally from Sweden with real Arctic experience, tapped out after failing to get fish, which had been her entire food plan.

The show took the AACTA award for best factual entertainment programme in February, before this season aired, which is a reasonable measure of how far the format has travelled since the first Tasmanian season in 2023.

For anyone who has just finished the History Channel's world championship season, it is the same experiment run by a different production, in colder country, for a smaller purse.