"We can love this sunburnt country without the sunburn," said Professor Georgina Long, accepting the Australian of the Year award alongside her friend, colleague and co-recipient Professor Richard Scolyer.
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The medical directors at the Melanoma Institute of Australia were honoured for their breakthrough research and treatment of skin cancer that is credited with saving thousands of lives.
Each of the other winners - Senior Australian Yalmay Yunupingu, Young Australian Emma McKeon and Local Hero David Elliott - are remarkable people deserving this acknowledgement and the platform their award gives them.
But, as is the case each year, the Australian of the Year will be the one whose message is heard loudest, and so Professors Long and Scolyer's work to combat a cancer that afflicts Australians at a higher rate than any other nation is timely and vital.
Decades on from the Slip, Slop, Slap message, which helped shake Australia out of its complacency around skin cancer, more than 18,000 people per year are diagnosed with melanoma. About 1300 were estimated to have died from it last year.
It is not near Australia's most deadly cancer, ranking at 11th, thanks in no small part to the work of the professors and their colleagues. But it is our third most frequent behind prostate and breast cancers.
And, as the professors passionately argued on stage in Canberra, it is largely preventable by simply protecting ourselves from the sun.
Taking aim at the "bronzed Aussie" ideal, they warned that on days like Australia Day, many of us are jeopardising our futures out in the deadly sun.
"Thousands of Aussies will be soaking up the sun working on their tans - or, as we see it, brewing their melanomas," Professor Long said.
"When it comes to tanning, we are swimming outside the flags. A tan is skin cells in trauma from overexposure to UV radiation from the sun."
There are encouraging signs for Australia, not only in the reducing death rate but in the visible way we go about our lives. At schools the "no hat, no play" rule is enforced. Long-sleeved shirts are a frequent sight in swimming pools. And the on-trend but protective beach tents are taking over our beaches.
Yet, for the second year in a row, the Australian of the Year acceptance speech took a shot at social media and its influence on young people. Last year Taryn Brumfitt's body acceptance crusade took aim squarely at unrealistic body ideals promulgated on social media.
And Professors Long and Scolyer struck a similar note when they challenged advertisers and social media influencers to "stop glamorising tanning, or using it to sell or advertise or entertain".
The risk is that, as we've seen decades of work in combating smoking undermined by a new generation embracing vaping, young people emerge from under their parents' stripey cabanas and do themselves enduring damage in the years before they too join the brigade of sun-smart parents of young ones.
While the professors' work and message is vital, there is an additionally very moving aspect to their story. Professor Scolyer's terminal brain cancer, and his colleague's determined efforts to use new and experimental therapies to extend his life, was an emotionally charged dimension to their acceptance speech.
"I love my life, my family, my work. I've so much more to do and to give," he said.
The greatest wish of one of our Australians of the Year is that he is alive this time next year. To hand on the baton to another great Australian. And to continue his work.
The least we can do is listen.
