In a country that mistakes exhaustion for strength, one woman didn’t just rewrite the rulebook—she tore it up and used the pieces to pave a new road.
Samantha Longmore, 32, from Yass, was announced the 2025 Shine Awards Overall Winner at an awards ceremony held last week. Nine years. More than a thousand stories. Drought angels, fire-line hay runners, teenage girls muster-ing the Kimberley from the cockpit, Indigenous women putting bush tucker on the world’s finest tables.
From that honour roll—names like Toni Barton, Margy Perkuhn, Emily Riggs, Sharon Winsor, Danny Mason-Kinder—Sam Long-more now rolls forward, unapologetic in a wheelchair, and claims her place.
Twelve years ago, her life ran on “tough.” On the eve of officer training at Duntroon, she was burning both ends and the middle: daylight on the farm, midnight till dawn bouncing at a Canberra nightclub. In the pre-dawn black, she drifted off the road. Two nurses found her walking wounded beside the wreckage.
An ambulance came. Forty-five minutes later, the first tragedy became a catastrophe. The ambulance driver fell asleep. The second impact severed her spinal cord and took the use of her right arm. When she woke, everything that had ever made her Sam—motorbikes, footy, throwing hay bales—was gone. She was a fighter with nothing left to fight for.
Most people would have stayed broken. Sam got angry. Then she got to work. She learned to ski again before she could walk, became the reigning world disabled water ski champion, and now drags 300-metre roosters of white water behind her like she’s daring the lake to try harder.
She stood inside the National Farmers’ Federation and said the sentence nobody else would: “Bragging about four hours’ sleep isn’t toughness—it’s slow-motion suicide.”
Sheds went quiet. Then they started talking. She built Ohhbulldust, a one-woman road-show that rolls into every muster and field day with the blunt gospel: pull over, speak up, live. She runs a weed-spraying contractor business that turns a profit and a mobile bar that pours beers at weddings and rodeos—proof you can be paralysed from the chest down and still be the life of the party.
Last month she finished her Bachelor of Counselling. In the evenings, she writes children’s books where the hero in the wheel-chair isn’t waiting to be saved—she’s the one doing the saving. Six manuscripts done, still hunting the publisher brave enough to print them.
Tonight, after taking the Courage category, she rose from a final table of seven extraordinary women to be named the 2025 Shine Awards Overall Winner.
Harvey Norman CEO Katie Page said, “Sam is the reason we started this whole thing.” That was enough. In tomorrow’s 32-page Shine magazine, you’ll meet the rest: women feeding schoolkids in the Gulf, flying choppers over firegrounds, talking broken farmers back from the edge. But the loudest message is Sam’s, and it’s simple. Real toughness isn’t driving home on no sleep because you’re too proud to pull over. Real toughness is surviving the crash, refusing the silence, and making damn sure nobody else has to crash twice.
From two wrecks in forty-five minutes, Samantha Longmore built a life that blazes. That awards night, rural Australia looked up, saw the brightest new fire in its sky, and finally understood what strength actually looks like.
Champion. Activist. Survivor. Sam.
– Tully Potts
