Former Idol alum Stan Walker has made his first public appearance since revealing his heartbreaking cancer battler.
The Australian Idol winner stepped out with new girlfriend Alex King, and the two posed on the red carpet together at the Tour de Cure Snow Ball held at The Star in Sydney on Saturday night.
The 27-year-old entertainer also performed at the event.
Walker first mentioned his new love in an interview with YahooBe last month, saying: ‘I’ve always got time for love. I’ve got a beautiful girlfriend who I’ve kept hidden away.’
Later that month fans got their first glimpse of Alex when Stan shared loved-up posts of the pair to his Instagram account.
This time a year ago, Walker was facing what he knew would be a major battle: having his stomach removed due to cancer.
There’d be months of gruelling rehab, weight loss, relapses and more surgery, even the uncertainty over whether he would ever sing again.
But what he didn’t know was that lurking inside him was not just one tumour—doctors found 13.
‘Cancer is like salt, and if it’s touched or moved it can spread even more. But even on its own it had spread fast,’ the singer revealed earlier this year, speaking to WHO ahead of the release of his documentary, Stan Walker: The Fight of His Life.
‘If I hadn’t done the operation, I would for sure be dead by now.’
He also has his mum, April, to thank for making him take a routine test in the first place. He knew that, like her, he carried an inherited mutation of the CDH1 gene, and as the fifth generation to be stricken with it, he stood an 80 per cent chance of contracting stomach cancer. The disease had killed many relatives including his grandfather, Rangi McLeod, whose quest to find the cause of his family’s health troubles was filmed for a 1999 BBC documentary, but who died of complications from his gastrectomy.
A year on, he and his mother are both cancer-free and have embarked on a new, healthier life. Walker has channelled his experience into music, releasing an EP of songs penned years ago, and a sweet tribute to his mum he wrote just before his diagnosis.
‘I probably just closed the biggest chapter of my life, with this EP and this documentary,’ he says. ‘Now, the music I’m making—I have so much coming out …
‘To be honest, I can honestly say going through that cancer thing, and the last however many years of everything, I am so thankful—because I haven’t been this happy in so long. I can look at myself and 100 percent back myself that I’ve got this.’