By ROSIE WATERLAND
“Hey, where are we again?”
Samuel Johnson has ridden through so many towns since starting his country-wide unicycle ride that he seems a bit stumped when I ask his location. He gets his answer from one of the team.
“A few hundred kilometres outside of Perth apparently!” he says, laughing.
So why is Sam in the middle of nowhere on a unicycle?
Because he loves his sister.
If you haven’t heard of the Love Your Sister campaign, here’s a rundown:
Sam’s sister Connie is 35 and the mother of two beautiful boys. She’s also dying of breast cancer. Connie’s had cancer three times in her life: the first time at 11 and the second at 22. Both times she fought hard to beat it, and won. This time however, Connie was diagnosed too late, and now the cancer has spread to her lungs, liver, pelvis, spine and knee. She has been given 6 – 12 months to live.
Upon learning she was terminal, Sam asked her what she wanted her legacy to be. “I said if I could just save one mum from having to say goodbye to her kids then, you know, I’d die happy,” she told me from her Melbourne home.
And that was all Sam needed to get started.
“A brother is very protective of his sisters,” Sam says. “And when you don’t feel like you can do anything to help it breaks your heart. And this is something that I could do and that she wanted me to do.”