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Starting out at just 13, Samantha Harris became Australia’s most prominent Indigenous model. Now, as she becomes a mum, Sam explains why representation is more important than ever. Read on for her very first photo shoot and interview since welcoming baby Bella.
It was a time of disappointment – and excitement. Samantha Harris and her husband Luke Hunt had been trying for a baby for more than a year, but despite their hopes, each pregnancy test returned a stubborn single line. Like many young couples, they’d thought the road to parenthood would come easily, yet were confronted by the reality that it’s harder than you think.
At the same time, there was another baby that Sam was nurturing – a book she co-authored with her mum, Myrna Davison.
Role Model: Taking Up Space in the Fashion World is drawn from their combined memories and experiences, and full of resilience and hope. Those experiences include Myrna surviving years in the Bomaderry Aboriginal Children’s Home, birthplace of the Stolen Generations in NSW, and her daughter Sam then overcoming steep odds to become Australia’s most prominent Indigenous model.
“I was going to be really busy, so I said, ‘We’ll revisit [having a baby] a little bit later in life,” Sam says now. But as is so often the case, the moment she stopped trying, fate stepped in.
Does Samantha Harris have kids?
Feeling tired and run-down during a regular joint training session in the park, Sam turned to Luke and said, “I think I’m getting sick.”
He reminded her that there was a leftover pregnancy test in the bathroom. And as he headed off to work for the day, he said to his wife, “Why don’t you use it?”
“It lit up like a Christmas tree,” Sam laughs of her genuine surprise. “I love that he knew and I didn’t.”
“She came at the perfect time,” Luke chimes in, as he looks down adoringly at their daughter, Bella Angélique Hunt.
The pair have chosen The Weekly to share their first family photoshoot and interview following Bella’s arrival on November 4, 2025. And despite Sam having strutted catwalks around the globe, gracing any number of fashion magazine covers and becoming the face of multimillion-dollar brands, she declares, “This might be my favourite shoot ever.”
The new parents are an agile tag team, stepping in or stepping aside when the other needs a break or a moment of their own in front of the camera, while seamlessly coming together at other times.
Where is Samantha Harris from?
Their ease is born of a relationship that began 19 years ago in their hometown of Tweed Heads in the NSW Northern Rivers region and resulted in marriage seven years later. It has since seen them tackle life’s challenges Together as a single united force.
Having been discovered in a modelling competition at the tender age of 13, Sam was one of the most in-demand faces of the time – but when she met Luke she was simply hanging out with a girlfriend at a Gold Coast shopping centre. She was 17, he was four years older, but they’d had mutual friends and had attended the same local high school. She thought he was “too cool for school”, but the pair got chatting and hit it off.
“I was a painfully shy girl,” she says of the fateful moment. “No boys liked me and I’d never had a boyfriend.”
Despite this, she summoned up the nerve to put her number in his phone. But then she didn’t hear from him for a month – as a fly-in, fly-out worker, he’d headed back to do a stint in the mines. And as it turns out, Luke was suffering from a rare case of nerves himself.
“I ended up sending Sam a text message to ask her out because I was actually too shy to speak to her face-to-face,” he recalls. “Which is strange, because I’m not a shy person at all.”
Falling in love
In classic young love fashion, they hung out as friends for a few weeks, driving around in Luke’s black Holden Commodore and eating KFC and Macca’s. And then Valentine’s Day arrived.
“He said to me, ‘I want to buy you a rose’,” Sam says with a smile. “You know how in high school everyone gets a rose? I’d never had one and I had always wanted one. And I thought, ‘That’s really nice, buying your friend a rose.’”
Driving to the beach, Luke parked at one of their favourite spots. Pulling out not just one rose, but a whole bouquet of them along with lilies and other blooms, Luke leaned in to give her what would be their first kiss.
“And I turned my head away because I got really shy,” Sam laughs. “But the rest is history. The right boy liked me, and now he’s my husband and the father of my child.”
What has Samantha Harris achieved?
As Sam turned 18 and her modelling career continued to expand, her agency suggested she move from Tweed Heads to Sydney to save all the flying back and forth. The thought of doing it alone felt utterly daunting. Having dated Luke for months, she confided her fears to him.
“And he says, ‘I’ll just come’,” she shares. “So we packed up his car and built a life together.”
For Sam, modelling has always been a passion, a dream since she was a little girl. The trappings that come with it – the fame, the parties, the glittering events – aren’t her cup of tea. However, there is one important by-product of public recognition that she loves: The ability to use her platform to give back.
As a proud Dunghutti woman, she has long used her voice and face to bring awareness to issues affecting Indigenous communities, as well as children and families dealing with vulnerability. She has advocated for inclusion and diversity, and agitated for protection of our land and wildlife.
Luke has been by her side every step of the way – including one fateful moment that would not only stay with Sam for life, but inspire their daughter’s name.
A fateful meeting
As an ambassador for Make-A-Wish Australia, Sam received a call some 11 years ago to meet a young girl called Bella, who was suffering from neuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer. When she needed to spend time in hospital, Bella would pass the time by flicking through fashion magazines.
“All the nurses would say, ‘Oh, you look like the model Samantha Harris,” Sam says now.
She figured it was due to the fact that Bella was Indigenous. But when she turned up to their meeting, she was blown away to see their uncanny resemblance.
“I made her a little stuffed monkey from the Build-A-Bear Workshop,” Sam says. “We didn’t do anything special, but after I’d hung out with her that day, I stayed in contact.”
For two years the pair chatted over Facebook, sharing cat pictures and their love of Disney films. And then, just after Bella’s 13th birthday, Sam received a call that devastated her – the youngster had relapsed. She passed away not long after, and was buried with the treasured monkey that Sam had given her.
“It broke my heart,” Sam says through tears today. “But I said to Luke, ‘When we have a daughter, we will call her Bella.’”
Having stayed in touch with Bella’s family since that awful time in 2017, Sam has sent them updates and photographs of her new baby.
“They said, ‘We would love to come to Sydney to meet your Bella one day.’ Oh, I would love that.”
The first days of motherhood
Motherhood suits Sam. A naturally warm and nurturing person, she’s relaxed into this new role in what seems like an effortless fashion. But of course, as any new mother knows, nothing is as simple as it seems.
“I’m not going to sit here and go, ‘Oh it’s so easy’. It’s definitely challenging, but in the most beautiful way. Just this last week, Luke has been on night shift so I’ve been up. There’s nothing worse when you’re sitting there, rocking the new baby and feeding them, and you’re just thinking to yourself, ‘Can you just go to sleep? Mum’s really tired. Maybe if I close my eyes, she’ll go to sleep.’ Then you look at her and she’s looking up at you and her eyes are huge and you’re like, ‘This child isn’t going to sleep any time soon!’
“But then I can’t help smiling as well, because she’s just locked on me – she’s not looking at anything else. I’d love to know what’s going on in that little brain.”
The good news, Sam adds, is that at least Luke is still up and able to take her calls or text messages.
“He calms me because I can get very flustered easily or I can get anxious,” she says of their dynamic. “I can dwell on things, and being a new mum, you’re not sure what to do. He always reminds me, ‘You’re a great mum, this isn’t forever, just breathe.’”
“I just always knew Sam would be a good mum,” says Luke, glancing adoringly at his wife as she tends to Bella. “She’s just brilliant with kids. She’s so loving. Anyone who works with Sam knows how much of a beautiful person she is. And she’s been amazing.”
A house full of love
The pair are committed to raising their daughter with all the love they themselves were showered with as kids, and that they share together.
“I say to Bella now, even though I know she doesn’t understand me, that I’m going to give her every opportunity,” says Luke. “I’m going to give that little girl the world so she can do what she wants with it.”
For Sam, who has often spoken of not having seen girls who look like her represented until she herself broke through, the idea that her daughter will be part of a generation who are able to follow their dreams, whatever they may be, is a very enticing idea.
“I love knowing that I could be a role model for kids out there – Indigenous, non-Indigenous – to just follow their dreams,” she says of where she is in life now. “I haven’t been given my career; I’ve worked really hard. I’ve also had a lot of amazing people on my side and do to this day.
“Hopefully I inspire the younger generation,” adds Sam. “And now it’s much more special because I have my own daughter. I can’t wait until she’s old enough to realise that her mum and grandma wrote a book.
The importance of representation
“It’s so much more important to have representation out there for kids growing up now, because with social media and other things, they can lose their way and only see the highlight reels. But if there are people out there telling their story – the good times, the bad times and all of that stuff – it makes it more real. It feels like it could be more achievable because someone else has done it.”
Sam also hopes that her daughter’s foundation of love is shaped by what she experiences at home. Her parents have always been, and remain, best friends. Their days of cruising around in Luke’s Commodore feasting on fast food might be long gone, but the basis of what they built in those heady teenage times remains.
“He always says to me, ‘I’ll never stop dating you’,” Sam smiles. “It sounds cheesy, but I found my other half. I hope that Bella, as she grows up, looks at how much Luke loves me and cares for me, and knows that’s how she deserves to be loved too.”
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This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
Sam Harris was the second guest on our inaugural podcast, The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Role Model: Taking Up Space in the Fashion World by Samantha Harris and Myrna Davison, Murdoch Books, is out now.
