If you look at the world’s flags, there are some pretty awesome ones out there. Due to the heavy contrast and bold colours, flags can be the most striking depiction of a country.
Australia’s nation colours, everyone in Australia agrees, are shithouse. Green and gold were never really meant to be put together, and yet we’ve got to sneak them into our olympic uniforms. See if you can spot them in this year’s olympics. owever, I really like them. We’ve built such a sporting name of ourselves with those colours, they mean something now, and they didn’t before. They feel like our culture, our heritage, like our gaudy high school uniforms. The more I look at those colours the more they look like home.
However, when confronted with the flags of all the nations, Australia’s flag... didn’t really seem like it represented our nation like the others. Look at Nepal’s flag. This flag was the one which pretty much made me feel a little bit bad about ours. Not only is it the only non-rectangular flag in the world, you could actually begin to see Nepal behind this flag. It’s got that punch which makes people think twice.
When reading the Wikipedia entry for the Flag of Australia I realised I wasn’t the only one who thought that our flag looked a little un-representative. The whole British emblem on the top left alongside the 800 other countries with almost the exact same flag makes it feel like “well, Britain's the important part”.
Take a look for a moment at the Australian Aboriginal Flag, but try and forget all the Aboriginal context that’s associated with it. Imagine the person you respect most has come up with this flag idea and it looks like that flag. OKOK, not quite like that flag, with the Red and Yellow bits matching the colour scheme of the Vietnam flag. Well.. maybe brighter yellow, but you get the idea. It’s dark and the Sun’s just coming up, and the earth is red. Is that not more like home, in your heart?
