WARNING: Survivor spoilers below.

Victorian truck driver Caleb Beeby has been crowned the winner of Australian Survivor: Redemption, beating out 23 other contestants to take home the show’s $500,000 prize.

Beeby, 28, had lasted 45 days in Samoa, emerging victorious over 24-year-old Sydneysider Jackson Goonrey in the final tribal council as both parties pleaded their cases to their fellow contestants.

“Being crowned sole Survivor is not just a title, it’s an identity, and I’ll be sitting here waiting …. keeping the crown warm until the next person can come and take it off my head,” Beeby said after his win.

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The show’s next winner might hold the title for a while. TV Blackbox recently reported that Ten had quietly scrapped plans to film another two seasons of the reality show back-to-back later this year, and will instead film just one instead – with this current season’s “performance and audience reception understood to be key factors”.

This was the first season of Australian Survivor to air since the dramatic ousting of popular host Jonathan LaPaglia, who made no secret of his disappointment to be losing the high-profile TV job he’d held since 2016.

“I didn’t get a direct call, which, I’ll be honest with you, was disappointing,” LaPaglia later told Stellar.

“After 10 years of helming their flagship show, it would have been nice to get a direct call from the people at the top, but I didn’t.”

He was replaced by former Australian Survivor winner and three-time player David Genat, a decision that proved controversial before the season even began – and sparked further debate once Redemption premiered and Genat copped the inevitable comparisons to his predecessor.

It’s undoubtedly been a softer season ratings-wise for Australian Survivor, with the show regularly ranking outside the top 20 in the overnight ratings, occasionally dropped as low as 24th and never making it above 14th in the overnight rankings.

Still, fans who were watching were pleased with last night’s result.

“Caleb won because he played a better game than Jackson. He is real and authentic. He expressed his pitch the best he could,” one fan wrote under the Instagram post announcing Caleb’s win.

“The more I learnt about Caleb, the more his story resonated with me. Couldn’t be happier about the win,” said another viewer.

Host David Genat dropped some information about the next season of Australian Survivor during last night’s finale, announcing that the next season will be filmed in Malaysia and will feature a “world-first theme never seen before”.