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Delta Goodrem is to represent Australia at Eurovision in May, the 70th anniversary of the annual song contest.
The 41-year-old singer – one of the country’s best-loved and bestselling pop stars – heralds a shift in Australia’s Eurovision selections, which have been smaller breakout acts and genre pioneers. She is the 11th entrant since Australia joined the competition in 2015 and will represent the country in Vienna, Austria.
“Eurovision is a … natural love for me,” Goodrem says, pointing to the two greatest influences in her life: Olivia Newton-John and Céline Dion, “who have both been on the Eurovision stage”.
To be chosen, she says, feels like “a celebration” – of a career which has leapt from milestone to milestone and cemented her in Australian pop history. She signed her first record deal at 15 before releasing her debut album, Innocent Eyes, which remains the second-highest selling Australian album and, by statistical estimates, graced one in every four Australian households when it was released in 2003.
In the intervening decades, she has released six more albums, judged eight seasons of The Voice Australia, played Newton-John in a biopic of the star, toured globally, started her own charity and spent one brief stint on stage as Cats’ grand dame Grizabella. Even though Eurovision has been “circling” her for a few years, the prospect has been waylaid by other projects.
It wasn’t until 2025, during a limited run of anniversary shows for her second album, Mistaken Identity, that the suggestion became feasible. When she got the official call-up later that year it felt like fate.
“I was really like … ‘This is meant to be the timing,’” she says. “This is the alignment. Let’s do it.”
By Christmas she was deep in writing sessions. “I just locked the door. I got my favourite songwriters … and we stayed in with three pianos having an amazing, creative time.”
The resulting track, Eclipse, is every bit as dramatic as its cosmic imagery, brimming with stars and moonlight and “planets aligning”. It opens with a plucked harp before a gust of wind sends it skywards with a key change and a thundering chorus: “The world stops for us / Only love exists / When we eclipse!”
The song, Goodrem says, “really is about alignment and everything working … in that one moment. It’s kind of magical when it happens.”
An eclipse – and its war between light and shade – feels apt for Goodrem’s career, which has often seen her alchemise personal difficulties into music. Four months after she released Innocent Eyes, at the peak of her breakout, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent the better part of the following year in recovery. In 2018 a complication from surgery paralysed a nerve in her tongue, forcing her to relearn how to speak and sing from scratch – an experience she wrote about in her 2020 single Paralyzed.
The biggest challenge of her career, Goodrem says, is “I have grown up in front of everybody … You can’t be in it this long and not have had different seasons, reasons and lines, and I think that I’ve tried very hard to stay true to my intention, which was people, connection.”
Now, Goodrem is on the precipice of another challenge: representing her country at an event mired in geopolitical controversy. Five countries – Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland and Iceland – decided to boycott this year’s Eurovision, after the contest’s organising body declined to expel Israel over its conduct in the war against Hamas in Gaza.
Did she consider the boycott in her decision? “I think it’s really important to … take everything into account,” she says. “I’ve stayed true to my intention from day one, which [is music as] a place of unity, togetherness … I believe in the healing powers and hope of music.”
As for how she would respond to those calling on Australia to join the boycott, Goodrem says: “I would probably revert to saying that music is a place of hope and healing … Eurovision has been going for 70 years, and I think there’s been a lot going on in the world.”
