People of Ryde presents Cameron Last

Published on 22 June 2020

My name is Cameron Last. I’m a year 10 student at Marist College Eastwood and I’m on the Ryde Youth Council. But that's probably not why you know me. You probably know me as the famous Sausage Boy – the kid who set out to eat a sausage at every booth in his electorate during both 2019 elections. But do you know how the famous sausage challenge started? Well, I guess things really started back on 5 July 2004, the day I was born, but I’ll give you the short version of the story and start in February 2019.

I had been making and finding content for a Facebook page known as Humans of Eastwood, a comedic page centred around Eastwood, but including the whole City of Ryde area. I was going down a rabbit hole on the internet when I found some videos from late 2015. It was around the release of Star Wars Episode 7. There were a multitude of reporters who were working in Star Wars jokes during the weather reports. It was then that inspiration struck.

“What if I did that but with sausages on election day? What if I did an election report but instead of reporting on the elections, I would report on the sausages!”

I decided to take this to the one man I knew who had the platform to do it. I went to Humans of Eastwood founder, Justin Li.

“I have an idea for Humans of Eastwood. What if you did a weather-report style democracy sausage report?” I said to Justin.

“We don’t know what the sausages taste like though. We would need to find someone willing to eat sausages from every Election Day Sausage Sizzle,” he replied.

“I’ll do it!” I said.

“Don’t you have campaigning to do?” he questioned.

“Campaigning? Unimportant!” I retorted, brushing my political commitments to the side.

So that’s how the idea for the famous sausage challenge started. I promptly forgot all about sausages and elections and went to bed that night blissfully unaware that Justin had taken me seriously, until I woke up the next day to my dad asking me: “Are you the Democracy Sausage Connoisseur?”

“Y-yeah,” I said, still half asleep.

“Are you the Democracy Sausage Connoisseur?” he said.

“Yeah, anyone can be a Democracy Sausage Connoisseur.”

My dad then left me alone then, probably realising I was too tired to think straight. An hour later my mum asked me the same question.

“Are you the Democracy Sausage Connoisseur?” she asked. At this point I had woken up enough to realise that something was up. I leaned into my mother’s phone to see the Facebook post on display. It announced me as the Humans of Eastwood Democracy Sausage Connoisseur.

“I guess I am. I didn’t realise Justin was serious.” I replied, flustered from shock. We then all laughed at the hilarity of the situation.

And that's the story of how I set out to eat 18 sausages at 18 different polling booths all around Ryde and lived to tell the tale.