True Blue: A Measure of Character (#499)
- Rick LeCouteur
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
To be true blue is to be loyal, trustworthy, steady, and unaffected.
No performance. No pretense. It’s about character under quiet pressure.
In Australia, true blue has long been shorthand for:
Mateship without sentimentality,
Fairness without moral grandstanding,
Equality without hierarchy, and
Decency without needing applause.
A true blue person doesn’t announce their values. They live them.
I have been away from Australia for much of the past fifty years.
Distance has a way of changing what you carry with you. Some things soften. Others sharpen. True Blue has always been one of the latter.
No matter how long I have been gone, the song True Blue by John Williamson draws me home.
Recently,I was live streaming the third Ashes Cricket Test (The Ashes is a biennial five game cricket series between Australia and England) from the United States when it happened.
The camera panned slowly across the crowd at Adelaide Oval, and then the opening notes of True Blue were heard. Not loudly. Not theatrically. But with the quiet certainty only John Williamson can muster.
The ballad was being sung to remember the victims of the Bondi mass shooting that had occurred the previous weekend.
Tens of thousands stood, and suddenly the distance collapsed. Time zones disappeared. I wasn’t watching Australia; I was in Australia.
What struck me most was the absence of spectacle. No choreographed fervor. No exaggerated nationalism. Just recognition.
People standing because standing felt right.
Listening because the words still mattered.
From half a world away, the moment landed with surprising force.
A lot had changed over five decades abroad - careers, continents, seasons of life - but the song hadn’t. Or perhaps it had simply stayed true to itself.
When True Blue was released by John Williamson in 1985, it didn’t arrive trying to define a nation. It asked a question instead. A quiet one. A serious one.
Is she/he true blue?
Not clever. Not ironic. Just honest.
That question has followed me far beyond Australia’s shores. It has echoed in lecture halls, clinics, boardrooms, and friendships.
Hearing it again - there, then, through a screen - reminded me that belonging isn’t about proximity or passports. It’s about values that endure when applause fades and distance intervenes.
True Blue works because it understands restraint. Musically, it’s unadorned. Lyrically, it avoids flourish. There’s no chest-beating nationalism, no grand claims of greatness.
Instead, John Williamson gives us something rarer: a measure of character.
And perhaps that’s why, even watched from the other side of the world, the song still knows exactly how to bring me home.
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