Survivor star's unique way to combat 'really bad' conditions during filming

She’s been described as one of the greatest players to have ever played Australian Survivor, so it was a big surprise to see Kirby Bentley eliminated during Sunday night’s episode.

Fan favourite Feras Basal made the huge move not to play his immunity idol for her, going against their final two plan and sending her straight to the jury.

What’s perhaps even more surprising than Kirby's elimination right before the finale is the fact that she was such a great player without being a super fan of the reality show.

Speaking to Yahoo Lifestyle following her elimination, the AFLW coach admits she had only seen a handful of episodes before flying to Samoa to compete.

“I've not watched a season or many episodes of Survivor. I'm a visual learner and a hands-on learner, so I need to be able to do something for it to really land,” she explains.

“I just wanted to go out and challenge myself and see what I could do. I had absolutely no expectations. I’m a big believer in seeing what unfolds and adjusting accordingly and I think it's so relatable to life, like things happen in life and you just need to adjust to it and be good.”

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While she’s disappointed she’ll never know what would’ve happened if she and Feras made it to the final two as they had originally planned, she says she has no regrets from her game and is thrilled with the experience.

“I went in really open-minded. I wanted to just play the game, enjoy it and make the most of it, and I feel like I really did,” she shares.

“Raymond, Aileen and Eden were talking about players I’d never heard of, so to not know anything about the game and do that, I walked out with a smile on my face.”

How Kirby tackled the tough conditions during filming

Kirby shares that the hardest part of filming Survivor was being “wet and cold” thanks to the rain, but she had a unique strategy to help this.

“I hate the cold, so I was grabbing rocks from the beachside and putting them in the fire to heat them up,” she details.

“It was like having a hot water bottle. So I’d put them on the fire for hours before we'd go to bed. And because our clothes were wet and everything else, they were going up my shirt, behind me, in between my legs. If I didn't have that, I would have struggled harder.”

She adds that she also heated rocks for her fellow tribe mates because everyone was struggling to sleep in the cold.

“So Aileen, Raymond, Feras, Kelli, I was giving them all these hot rocks to be like, ‘Here, sleep properly’. It was pretty bad,” she remarks.

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Despite the tough conditions, Kirby admits she would “100 per cent” do it all again if she was given the chance to play a second time.

“I liked the experience, I think of it as a small-scale social experiment,” she says. “I feel like it gives a lot of people an insight into who they actually are and how they view the world and the reasons why they view the world that way.

“Some people really struggled, but we’re on an island, it’s all temporary, there’s a little bit of food and it’s all gonna be fine. I feel like a lot of people have really grown and learned a lot about themselves.”

Australian Survivor continues 7:30pm Monday on Channel 10

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