Wearing an open-neck countryman's shirt and donning the peaked cap of the volunteers who rebuild the fences and lives of farmers struck by bushfire and other disaster, new Governor-General General Sir Peter Cosgrove came to the small Victorian town of Wandong to celebrate what he called the Australian spirit.
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The very worst of circumstances, he told a crowd of hundreds, many of them victims of Victoria's Black Saturday and more recent fires, brought out the best in Australians.
"We will bend our backs and empty our pockets to help others," he said.
The thousands of volunteers who had joined Blaze Aid, formed soon after the Black Saturday fires of 2009, had not only re-built enough fencing to span Australia, they had built bridges between themselves and those who needed help, he said.
It was Sir Peter's first public engagement since becoming Governor-General.
He was piped to the strains of Waltzing Matilda into the event, near Kilmore north of Melbourne, by former West Australian police band piper and Blaze Aid volunteer Jimmy Clarysse.
But it was clear Sir Peter, who has seen a bit of disaster in his time - in war in East Timor, in the wake of earthquake and tsunami in Aceh and in cyclone-struck north Queensland - wanted this to be an informal occasion, with the focus on volunteers rather than him.
He presented Blaze Aid founder Kevin Butler with a new Australian flag, noting the flag flew over all Blaze Aid projects and was "becoming a bit tattered". And he and his wife Lady Cosgrove presented Mr Butler's wife Rhonda with the sort of gift that is exchanged routinely in a thousand Australian homesteads - a fruit cake.
And with that, the new Governor-General plunged in among the crowd of volunteers and farmers whose lives and fences are being re-built. He was mobbed, and it was hard to pick out the vice-regal among the country folk around him.
Soon after, he visited the Wallan property of a young couple, Scott and Liz Pape, who lost their home, almost half their flock of 300 sheep and most of their fences in the bushfire that raged through the district in early February.
Dandling the couple's nine-month-old son, Sir Peter looked around at volunteers hammering fencing droppers and spooling wire and said here was a ‘‘brilliant young Australian family being helped by Australians of all ages".
And how did he feel about being a new knight, he was asked.
"I'm not caught up with titles," said the Governor-General. He had, he said, been given various military titles since he left school.
"I've never been called Mister," said Sir Peter.
