“I have a fair understanding of that part of Tassie,” the 59-year-old former SAS trooper says. “It wouldn’t have been that far from where I grew up. It’s hard, it’s miserable, it can be doom and gloom, which can play with your emotions quite heavily. Whereas in this season, I was in a spectacular place, but it had its environmental factors too. It was a challenge.”

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.

Having grown up in foster care after his father left the family and his mother sank into alcoholism, Petersen’s focus is on the importance of intergenerational relationships. He applied for the show, he says, because he wanted his own adult sons to see that he was still game.

“I’m not on a pedestal for my boys, but they constantly see me and my beautiful wife challenging ourselves,” he says. “For them to look back and go, ‘Dad was almost 60 when he applied for Alone,’ they’d be stoked that I would give something like that a crack.”

The landscape in New Zealand is more spectacular than it was in Tasmania, but the weather is more extreme; with 7000 mm of rainfall per year, Fiordland is one of the wettest places on the planet, which makes starting a fire (and keeping it burning) immensely difficult.

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.

“If you haven’t done that, you’re going to struggle,” he says. “You’ll be on the backfoot if you’re not thinking of it the night before, and having a pile of dry material.”

Petersen uses the word “accountable” a lot when talking of his adventure – accountability to the task, to himself, to his wife and boys, to his sense of right and wrong. But had he done this 20 years ago, he confesses, he might not have played such a straight bat.

“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 [to hunt the native wildlife] 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.”

Petersen can’t say how far he goes in the series. But he can say the isolation was not his undoing in the way it has been for some other participants in other seasons (in the US and Scandinavia as well as Australia).

“It was me doing it for me in a lot of ways, and that ability to have time alone just dissolves away that inner dialogue where you feel like you need to be accountable to other people and their decisions and what they think,” he says.

“That quiet time, I recommend for anyone. You don’t necessarily have to go on a show, but give yourself that time – I’d say probably a minimum of a week – away from contact with anybody. I think it’s needed in the fast-paced world that we live in now. The benefits, I think, would be incredible for headspace and wellbeing.”

Alone Australia (season 2) premieres on SBS on Wednesday, March 27, at 7.30pm.