And yet the flag only appeared in 1971......

What? About the same time as that traditional dot painting style.
Gne

mccrindle reasearch survey 2013Personally I see the upper left as representing our history, why should we not acknowledge it? It's good enough for the state of Hawaii, it too represents a significant part of their history. Perhaps my view is shaped by having served under the flag, as did my Father in WWII, and a brother KIA.Amen Keg.

and the ‘traditional’ welcome to country and smoking ceremonies..

Are there any literary, educational or other grants that are exclusively for non-aboriginal people? No?
Then why am I excluded from receiving money for things reserved for ATSI people? Such discrimination in reverse only serves to continue the Apology Grovelling and dividing our nation. We are all in it together, don't go down the Them and Us road.

Here's a more recent and larger survey:

The survey found 64 per cent of respondents believed the Australian flag should change, compared with 36 per cent who believed it should remain the same.

History is a multifaceted thing. For some it represents what they see as positive aspects of Australia's history. For a lot of Indigenous people it represents a government, a people who legally discriminated against them, denied them to right to vote, separated families, banned them from clubs, cafes and hotels.

Dot painting specifically on canvas originated in the 1970's, but the tradition of Indigenous art, partly in dot style, had been done on rocks, bodies and even in the sand for about 5,000-10,000 years.

Nope, Welcome to Country ceremonies have been an established part of Indigenous culture for thousands of years, generally being kept between groups of indigenous people only, but also were made for Dutch and Indonesian explorers 300-400 years ago.

The whole fact non Indigenous Australians only became aware of such practices in the 70's may have had something to do with the social changes in Australia regarding relations between Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians that occurred in the 60s and 70s. With open discrimination still pretty common, learning the cultural practices of Indigenous people wasn't a high priority for most other Australians.

There is some thread drift RH however, there is no suggestion at play to alter the QA emblem.

Shouldn't an ape feature on the new flag? After all that's where it all began.

An aquaintance who is currently a senior Public Servant in Canberra once informed me that they were invented by Canberra Bureaucrats in the early 70's. And so were the 'traditional smoking ceremonies'.

Make of that what you will.

My own opinion is that there were around 500 different Tribes of Indigenous Peoples existant around the time of the arrival of the First Fleet, that they all had these 'traditional' ceremonies, ie 'Welcome to Country' and 'Smoking' is indeed somewhat hard to accept.

Considering also, that it is well recorded that most Tribes simply did not get along with each others and quite often engaged in some fairly bloody battles with each other!

True, faithfully recorded in thousands of years of written aboriginal history along with aboriginal aerodynamics texts.

I would be reluctant to rely on a Wikipedia article that contains no historical (as in, written prior to 2000) references.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/benn...ut-preferable/

https://www.australiangeographic.com...me-to-country/

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arc...361a5db68c546f

https://www.aboriginal-art-australia...hind-the-dots/

Do some reading and make up your own mind, Dr Dre clearly has.

So the first link (no agenda in the Quadrant eh?)

Instead, as is well if not widely known, they were created as recently as the 1970’s by none other than Ernie Dingo and his cobber, Dr Richard Walley

However if that "journalist" had bothered to actually check what Dr Walley had said about the practice he apparently created:

“It’s an old thing that’s been around for thousands and thousands of years,” Richard Walley OAM told NITV News over criticism Thursday by an historian that Welcome to Country ceremonies are new rituals.

“It’s the new interpretation of it that’s quite recent, but it’s connected to something that’s quite ancient.”

Dr Walley never claimed to have created Welcome to Country, just start the modern interpretation into mainstream Australia of a long held tradition

The Australian Geographic article:

For thousands of years Aboriginal people have performed a type of ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremony when one tribal group sought to enter the lands of another. This traditional protocol took many forms, it could be spoken, sung, performed and possibly there would be a smoking ceremony, depending on the traditions of the local group.

Almost exactly 40 years ago these ceremonies first began to enter the Australian mainstream after a performance by West Australian Richard Walley and the Middar Theatre at the Perth International Arts Festival (which is on again for another few days) of 1976.

Yep that's pretty much what I said

In an aviation context some airlines are performing Acknowledgment of Country on flights, not Welcome to Country so this debate is a bit redundant anyway

As for the dot art article:

Before Indigenous Australian art was ever put onto canvas the Aboriginal people would smooth over the soil to draw sacred designs which belonged to that particular ceremony.

Body paint was also applied which held meanings connected to sacred rituals. These designs were outlined with circles and encircled with dots.

Dot painting originated 40 years ago back in 1971. Geoffrey Bardon was assigned as an art teacher for the children of the Aboriginal people in Papunya, near Alice Springs. He noticed whilst the Aboriginal men were telling stories they would draw symbols in the sand.

Bardon encouraged his students to paint a mural based on traditional dreamings on the school walls. The murals sparked incredible interest in the community. He incited them to paint the stories onto canvas and board. Soon many of the men began painting as well.

At first they used cardboard or pieces of wood, which was later replaced by canvas.

Bardon helped the Aboriginal artists transfer depictions of their stories from desert sand to paint on canvas.

Yep that's pretty much what I said. Indigenous art, some in dots, was first done on rocks, bodies, in the sand even, before being transferred onto canvas. But the art and the stories behind it go way back. Think of it like Renaissance artists painting things like the Sistine Chapel. Artwork made of an artist's interpretation of religious or spiritual stories from long ago. Indigenous spiritual stories have mostly been passed down via oral tradition, but same principal. We don't look at grand examples of Renaissance art and think "yeah these events probably never happened so the art is therefore meaningless" now do we?

Aviation context - we've had some fantastic Indigenous artwork on Australian aircraft. Of course those exact paintings weren't done thousands of years ago, but the meaning and stories behind them have a long tradition.

Flying Art Series

I'm afraid your links don't persuade me one way or the other Icarus, I'd like to read something scholarly by someone who knows what s/he's talking about. I'll ask the question of someone who has had much to do with the outback communities when we next meet for coffee to gauge their opinion.

It's a pity there is no avenue currently available whereby we can learn of the Aboriginal norms and culture. The Alaskian Clinkit native tribe have perfected the teaching of their customs to visitors

Do you mean "other Americans"??

That is part of the point, to think that a group of aboriginals in Cape York had anything in common with a group in lower WA is difficult to understand. To try to call hundreds of disparate nomadic tribes a “First Nation” is social engineering, unless of course you follow Bruce Pascoe and believe they built thousands of huts and were farming.

The core issue is, when the British came to Australia there were people already living here. It is evident they were here for a very very long time, so long in fact they are considered the first inhabitants of this land or by definition, Aboriginal. There is a flag that represents this fact and is freely available for public use. Considering what it represents it should given sufficient exposure to become readily identified as being associated with Australia. There are Australian aircraft that fly around the nation and overseas, many of these aircraft have a flag painted on their external surface, why not add the Aboriginal flag?

I get what you’re saying. Why not? Perhaps because it’s a flag that represents about 2% of the population, whereas the national flag represents everyone. I realise there are other ways of looking at it.

Why not? Go ahead. If you want the “aboriginal” flag up there then also put up the TSI flag. Why not?

Why not.

Multiple examples of carriers sporting multiple flag liveries:

https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....eda43dfa54.jpg
https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....c86d7a3665.jpg
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....c860827090.jpg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....92b5cfcf1a.jpg


The whole debate around changing the national flag is there are a lot of people who think the flag does not represent everyone, and that's far more than just Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. To me the current flag says those of British/Anglo Saxon descent are considered a little more "Australian" than the rest.

Caribbean Airlines displays one National Flag - that of Trinidad and Tobago - and the emblem of the Caribbean Community. Hawaiian Airlines displays one National Flag - that of the United States of America - in the position reserved for that flag and the state flag of Hawaii (notably that state flag includes the Union Jack - the Hawaiian state flag was commissioned by a native Hawaiian, Kamehameha I, and is older than the Australian national flag). Lufthansa displays one National Flag - that of Germany - and the flag of the European Union, an intergovernmental/supranational organisation. Scandinavian Airlines displays stylised national flags of the three airlines that were combined to form it - Det Danske Luftfartselskab (flag carrier of Denmark), Det Norske Luftfartselskap (flag carrier of Norway) and Svensk Interkontinental Lufttrafik (a Swedish airline) - as SAS is the flag carrier for all three Scandinavian countries.

Changing the Aussie flag to include the Aboriginal flag at the Canton would say to Torres Strait islander people that one indigenous heritage is considered more important than the other. It would say to 98% of Aussies that one group of people is a little more Australian than the rest. See how this goes? There is no easy solution to that issue.

Someone who has ancestors stretching back 30,000 years in this county is no more an Aussie than someone like me who’s ancestry dates back to the early 1800s, or someone who became an Aussie four days ago on Australia Day. We are all Aussies and on THAT we should be all equally proud.

I’m OK with uniting behind a symbol that truly WOULD unite us. IE a flag that would see us retire the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags also. One flag to represent the entire nation, not continue to seek to divide us into our different ‘tribes’. However I don’t think those advocating for a change to the current flag would be able to achieve that. So until that time I’d prefer to stick with what we have given that for the overwhelming majority of us, that’s the flag that has represented us for all of our lives.

That's a strawman. Almost all proposals to change the flag do not include replacing the Union Jack with the Aboriginal Flag in the canton. In the "Triple Union Flag" video I posted earlier they explained that clearly. But at least you acknowledge the significance of an emblem in the canton, and how on the current flag it directly signifies the UK nation is in the superior position on the Australian flag, or those of British heritage in Australia are considered more important than non British Australians. Thanks for making my point.

There's a very easy solution. Get rid of the Union Jack from the Canton. You can then move the Commonwealth star up a bit to the middle of the hoist side and have a minimalist change but remove the error on the flag.

Yep - but current flag says if you're of British heritage you're currently more "equal" than others.

Overwhelming majority - becoming less by the day. In the first half of the 20th century, when the flag was designed, 90% of Australia was of Anglo ancestry. Now that's declined to about 60%. Future projections only show Anglo Australians becoming a smaller share of the pie. If we look at the migration statistics for the last FY there was full migration, 18/19 (likely to be in the same proportion when migration resumes soon), 92% of migrants came from somewhere other than the UK. Even if I was generous and included all the immigrants from the other majority Anglo nations in the figure of Anglo migrants, like NZ and USA, it still means 85% of migrants are probably non Anglo ancestry. So in the coming decades Australians of an Anglo Saxon background will be in the minority. It's a statistical inevitability.

And represented all of us? Everyone sees how they are represented by the flag differently. I see within recent years some of the events where Australian flags are prominent amongst crowds are things like the Cronulla Riots or those far right "patriot" rallies. That's not something that represents me, and more often now I see people displaying Australian flags as being associated with the views those groups hold. Now I'll make it clear I'm not saying everyone who flies an Australian flag holds those views, but those views seem more prominent in flag wavers. For instance a survey showed people who fly Australian flags from their cars were twice as likely to hold positive views of the White Australia Policy.

They managed to do it in Canada a long time back. As far as I can see there's no movement in Canada today to return to the pre 1965 Union Jack flag. Are you saying Australians are more incompetent and less mature than Canadians?

Well said, Keg. The problem with so many of these things is that they are inherently divisive. Take something like a ‘welcome to a country’. Essentially a nice thing, welcoming someone. Except that it automatically places that person in the position of an outsider, unless you’re welcoming them back home, which is not at all how I see a welcome to country. (Would be a great idea though, if that’s what it could become.) I was born here, as were my parents, their parents, their grandparents and so on. A few of them died in its service. It’s the only home any of us have ever known. Why should I be ‘welcomed’ here as an outsider? I’m not, and nor is someone who became a citizen just the other day. The last Anzac Day ceremony I was at, we were welcomed - to our own homeland - by a lovely young lady who was born here about 30 years after I was. She did a genuinely great job, but something about it didn’t sit quite right. Then we have the inevitable acknowledgments of traditional owners, for which there’s a time and a place, but which just gets done to death. At my kid’s school graduation, there were - I kid you not - no fewer than FOUR acknowledgments of the traditional owners before they got around to even mentioning the kids. The ‘is, was and always will be’ part is meaningless and insincere - after all, the land was taken, concreted over, had a school built on it, and isn’t getting handed back any time soon. All the lip service and platitudes do nothing in improving the plight of indigenous people.

I think there’s plenty in indigenous culture for us to learn about and respect, but can’t see that divisive, empty gestures, and the elevation of any one group over the rest, are really helping in the long run.

Not necessarily, that’s simply your opinion. You could also view it as acknowledging the foundations and institutions of what has turned out to be a remarkably peaceful, prosperous and diverse nation, whatever faults it might have.

I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re suggesting for a possible future flag. Your Canadian example isn’t directly applicable though, IMHO, given the long-standing and substantial French influence there.

Loyalty to flags mostly escapes me.
Recently, the most commonly seen flag in Melbourne was that of Serbia. But not a lot of Serbian flags on Oz day.

The difference Dre is that it’s you who considers the Union Jack to be in a position of privilege and therefore anything that goes in it’s place automatically privileges that replacement. I personally don’t consider the Union Jack to be more important than any other part of the flag

However to me the flag is of secondary importance. It’s something that we look at addressing once we’re firmly convinced that we are all Australian and united in what that means. Once we do away with the exclusionary statement ‘always was, always will be’ and all the other power statements, power flags, power symbols that are intended to divide us only then I’ll be convinced that we can address having a flag that truely does unite us as a nation.

Personally I’d do away with the states and state flags also. I always found the states to something that was only useful when playing state of origin or deciding who I was going to barrack for in the AFL grand final. I didn’t consider my identity as a NSWelshman anything significant at all. Having the states doesn’t bother me for inane and light hearted things like football but when the tribal identity (state, flag, land, power statement, etc) is used as a weapon of control against other Aussies I find that incredibly offensive (to use the lingo of the woke oppressed).

So the discussion about a flag isn’t actually about the flag at all. It’s about identity. If people want to call themselves Aboriginal Australians, or naturalised Australians, or Anglo Aussies, or Vietnamese Australian or even just Aussies (irrespective of their personal heritage) then I’ve no gripe with that as long as they see their primary identity as being an Aussie.

However whilst some hold those ‘descriptors’ as being more important than the ‘Australian’ part then it’s going to be hard to ever have a sensible discussion about being united and deciding on a flag that will unite us all.

Far out, if the indigenous want to have smoking ceremonies and welcome to country, whether it was invented last week or 40,000 years ago, let them. If there’s one thing this thread has highlighted, there’s a lot of people with little tolerance, and there’s just as many who think we need to hand everything over to apologise for the last 230 years!

Why don’t we just all get along and treat each other equally. Look forwards in writing our future, while acknowledging our past. But don’t let the past write the future.

As for the flag, we have one currently, it’s called the Australian flag. If everyone (or the majority) feels strongly about adopting another one which acknowledges all parts of our society, then make the noises in the right places.

When the United Kingdom disintegrates, losing Scotland and/or Northern Ireland, will the Union Jack currently comprised of the red cross of St George for the Kingdom of England, the white saltire of St Andrew for Scotland and the red saltire of St Patrick to represent Ireland, lose the redundant components?

If it does, will the Australian flag undergo matching changes?

It's as if they think if they can just prove that smoking ceremonies were invented after white settlement, then they can dismiss them as irrelevant, though I'm not sure if this would be because anything dating to after 1770 should not be taken seriously (hello? the entirety of white Australian history?) or because anything dating to after 1770 by blacks is uppity behaviour against white domination? Neither is an attractive conclusion...

Canada changed their flag to a popular and instantly recognisable design 56 years ago and don't seem to obsess about becoming a republic at all (perhaps something to do with their southern neighbours?).

This isn't a matter of differing personal opinions. North American Vexillological Association - the canton is the point of honour on the flag. The Flag Institute - the canton is the most significant part of the flag. Even the current Australian Prime Minister's website - the canton is the position of honour on the flag. The experts are not on your side.

Who knows? We'll probably look even dumber if we only change our own flag solely in response to another nation changing theirs.

Maybe the best option will be for Australian airlines to follow what some airlines have done, most notably nearby with Air New Zealand, and remove all national flags from their aircraft. It doesn't seem to be an ICAO requirement and would anyone really miss a tiny mark you have to squint to see on the back of the fuselage?

As far as I can tell no one seemed to notice or care when Air NZ dropped the small NZ flag from their aircraft when they changed liveries in 2013.

But only if you know what a maple leaf is. It only says "Canada" to someone who already knows about Canada. If the Canadian flag was something else, because I know about Canada, I'd recognize their flag. It's about being educated. That's where I have issues where others say "Our flag doesn't shout Australia". Well unless you put a kangaroo on it, it's unlikely ever to. People not recognizing our flag is not our problem, it's theirs. It's basically advertising. Everyone knows the US flag because it's so in your face all the time, but it doesn't intrinsically show anything "American". Most people probably wouldn't know what any of the items that make it up mean, but they recognize it. I don't know what the flag of Turkmenistan looks like, but I bet that doesn't mean the population of Turkmenistan is all bent out of shape over that fact.
My issue with changing our flag is, a/ tradition etc takes time to build, and we've got 120 years of history invested in it (more or less the same flag), and b/ I've not seen any changes that don't seem to be a sop to some noisy minority in some way or other, or look like they were drawn by a colour-blind pre-schooler.
I actually quite like the Eureka flag as a design, irrespective of its origins, but that has been appropriated by the bogans, and would not solve the recognition of sundry minorities issue. Perhaps the current flag with the Union Jack removed and the Federation star moved to the canton (examples are out there) might be acceptable? Nice and simple, not too big a change.....does look like just another Pacific fly speck one though.
Unfortunately, rather than something that represents us, we just seem to be looking for a flag that doesn't offend anyone, which seems to be the only criteria for most things these days.

And unfortunately it seems that no matter what changes would be suggested, someone, somewhere, would profess to be offended by them!:ugh:

Keg; Well said!

I'm offended by any oblong shaped object.

I mean to say: "oblong". The word itself is offensive.

Air New Zealand had been a bit on again, off again when it came to the New Zealand flag being displayed on their aircraft.

The flag was on the tail of the old Tasman Empire Airways Ltd (TEAL) aircraft between 1954 - 1965. They then dropped it in 1965 when they adopted Air New Zealand into the company name and the flag wasn't reinstated to their livery until 1981. The flag was retained with the adoption of the "Pacific Wave" paint scheme in 1996 before being dropped when they adopted the "Silver Fern" livery in 2013.

Of note with regards to the "Silver Fern" livery was that that was adopted on Christopher Luxon's watch as CEO. Luxon was a vocal advocate at that time for changing the New Zealand flag to Kyle Lockwood's blue, white and black silver fern flag.

Oh, I’m quite aware of the convention surrounding these things. I personally don’t view the Aussie flag that way. For me the southern cross and federation star (however redundant it seems to be these days) are equally as important.

The answer to your last question:
who owns the aircraft; definitely not you. The owners decide what they paint on their aircraft.


So who do you think the “First Nations” people of the United Kingdom are and which flag should British Airways have on their aircraft.?

nail - head.

Unfortunately that’s too difficult and rather than go and spend time in a community and improve lives, the liberal elite will just chip away at easy victories like flags.

I’ve met many inspirational First Nations people and they are first to admit they are too busy sorting out real issues in their communities to get worked up over which flag QF has on its jets.