Alison de Chazal is a trained ballerina, model and one of only 1 500 people to have taken part in the Survivor franchise! Despite being 13 years older than any other contestant in the group, her grit and determination saw her through to the final five.
“The experience was up there with having my five children,” says Alison. “The mind is a powerful thing and your body adapts to help you survive.”
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After touring with the Durban Ballet Workshop, getting married and having her first child – all by the age of 22 – Alison was convinced to join a modelling course, which proved to be the beginning of an exciting chapter for the young mother. She was picked out as the most promising model in the group and offered work in the industry. One of the most notable jobs was the “Durban’s Got It” tourism campaign. “People still recognise me from that, even though I had my back to the camera,” she says.
Just five months after having her second child, Alison was again in front of the camera… in Mauritius for a bikini shoot!
Her first marriage ended in a divorce in 1981 and she moved to Cape Town, where she worked as a cut rose distributor. “It was a horrible job! I had to collect the flowers from the airport, then rush around trying to sell them before they died.”
Woolworths had just started selling cut flowers and Alison decided they were the answer to her prayers, so she headed straight to the company’s head office. Despite having no CV and no qualifications, she tracked down the HR department, arranged an interview and, within a couple of weeks, was shadowing an assistant buyer within the company.
She was soon promoted to assistant buyer and then buyer, travelling around the world. “Having never done a qualification, that was like my university degree,” she says.
Alison met her current husband through work and, after getting married, they moved to Joburg, where they lived for eight years before returning to Durban – one of about 29 moves Alison has made in her lifetime.
“I’ve had a chequered life, with some very difficult times, but it’s made me who I am and I don’t regret a thing. Life experience makes you perceptive and makes you less judgemental because you can relate to everyone on some level.”
She has always been a big fan of Survivor, so when the opportunity came to audition to play the game, she jumped at it! The interview process was carried out over a few weeks, including a gruelling panel interview in Joburg, to which Alison took a haversack with her island essentials, just in case they whisked her off suddenly…
Having been instructed not to tell anyone where she was really going, Alison told her children that she was going to Australia to visit her brother. She was determined to do it as Alison, not as a mother or wife, but being separated from her family for five weeks was incredibly difficult.
“The game is all-consuming when you’re there and it was so much harder than I thought it would be. That said, it’s affected all our lives for the better,” says Alison. “We appreciate being able to spend time together and I am so grateful to have a fridge full of food, and to be able to drive my car whenever I need to.”
“It was such an honour to be chosen, but there were times when I wondered what I was doing there – you’re starving, sleep deprived and paranoid. Watching it at home in your pjs, having just eaten supper, you can’t imagine what it’s like to spend every day out in the open in 40 degree heat, where nothing is certain. The thing that kept me going was knowing that it wouldn’t last forever.
The best part, for me, was when we’d reached the top six and we each had one of our family members visit. When I saw my husband, my legs started shaking and I just ran to him. Hilton says he was heartbroken when he left because I was a wreck – I was dehydrated and had lost 6kgs, plus there’s no deodorant, no toothbrush…
One of the things I wanted to gain through the experience was to separate myself from the material things, to get to know the real me. When I got back to real life, I was psychologically shattered and didn’t want to go anywhere. I cried, a lot. It was a difficult adjustment, but I think about my time on Survivor every day.
There’s great power that comes with knowing that you really can survive if you need to. I’ve slept on the floor, in driving rain, with rats crawling on me – after that, I know I can do anything.”
Survivor photos by www.planetivan.com