Dear Brian,

No need to add anything
Just remove the'Jack'
Leave the blue field with the Federation Star and Southern cross

Unscrupulous or apathetic Australians tolerate the use of their national flag for any grubby purpose.

Mention a flag change if your celebrity profile is in the doldrums, or your voter popularity rating is sliding, or you need an inflammatory issue to distract media scrutiny from somewhere else.

If the flag was changed the same game would continue, just with updated rhetoric.

(I have my own Aboriginal symbolism. It is a spectacular rock face near where I live. I sometimes imagine Aborigines living close by - a long, long time ago. They saw the spirits of the ancestors in that rock. It is in that timeless rock that I see a memorial to that lost way of life. In this context, coloured bunting on a stick has no relevance.)

Love it, love it, love it. What better respect can be given to Indigenous Australians if we all found our special place in nature where you can feel the spirituality of the landscape. What better religion is there and what better way than to reach a commonality of understanding. I mean isn't this what they have been telling us for how long? Also we never tell anyone about our special place, like Indigenous kept their secret places to themselves. Nobody seems to understand this concept but it is really basic to human nature.
We are the ones that need to connect to the earth and find our lost way of life, they still do feel that even if the everyday lifetsyle was lost, we are the true losers. Nature is full of symbols, treasures, spiritual places etc so yes flags do seem quite redundant and very frivilous to represent Indigenous Australia when reading your article.

That one comment, bless you, is the best I have read on Indigenous culture in along time. So refreshing. If you find such a connection it does become ritualistic, it does become addictive as it is the richest food for the soul one can find.

On the flag, yes is true. Also here our Indigenous firends complain of the migaloo ways. They cannot get a word in over the loud chattering classes of course :)

Bless you, bless you, bless you. I cannot speak for all Indigenous but our friends I know would say, amen to that.

Surely the very main thing a flag reflects is its history. Countries change in many ways over a period of time. Their attitudes, culture and even their religion, so why change the story behind all this ? Otherwise we would be changing our flag every 150 years because someone would get up and say it was offensive in some way. Would the British consider changing their flag because St George, St David and St Andrew were no longer relevant. It reflects their history. I think it is petty to remove the one symbol on our flag that more than any other says how we originally developed and perhaps because we happen to be a younger nation in the modern historical sense.

Ray Martin and other people wanting to strip Australia of its current flag and, along with it, part of our history are most certainly wrong. Polls indicate that 72% of us want the flag left the way it is.

The utter crap about 'more properly representing the changes in Australia's inhabitants' that is often bandied around is the silliest reason of all for changing our flag. Just imagine the US, the UK or France changing their flag just because they have a lot of immigrants whose culture is unlike the host population! Not that immigrants seem to want the change of course. It's the usual Lefty suspects who cause most of the trouble.

"wiped out over half of their population with smallpox". Geez how did the remainder survive the shootings of the Native Police and settlers, poisoned flour,the depredations of alcohol,opium, other illnesses and their forced removal to reserves and missions?

The usual suspects, not just hasbeen second rate celebrities like poor old Ray whats'isname, but also the ancient embittered political schemer, wealthy wannabee famous somebody type, and assorted fringe dwellers, all emerge from dusty obscurity whenever the flag issue is mentioned. A perennial topic with which to loudly boor the rest of us. So predictable and so tedious.

even Julia Gillard is politically smart enough to maintain the current model.

They can change the flag if they want. But the millions of Aussie kids out there who now have pride in their country, thanks largely to John Howard, will still be wrapping themselves up the the current flag and flying it high above their front yards - I guarantee it.

Brian wants to begin with the big picture, explaining that we’re all one big family. All of us: Albert Namatjira, Osama bin Laden, you, me, Brian himself, and everyone else are united by our common ancestry.

The hope that he offers through this acknowledgement of our great- grandmother, Mitochondrial Eve, is that it will encourage us to share the world’s resources evenly and fairly.

Though a grand dreamer, he does not see far enough. Why doesn’t he take this further and more globally to our more ancient ancestors? What about the other apes, and then the other quadrupeds, vertebrates, amphibians, fish, tomatoes, algae, and single cell bacteria? We share our common with these our brothers (and sisters), why can’t we share our resources too with them?

And all these too should be able to be united under a common flag.

Don’t get me wrong, Brian. I’m with you all the way, brother. But I do find your logic difficult to follow.

The opinions of Ray Martin and his croissant gobbling breakfast buddies are remote from the majority of folk whose flag it really is. Unlike some faux folk, whose comments precede this humble post, fair dinkum Australians don't want to to dump their heritage.

Australia's Irish, Scottish and Chinese heritage is just as relevant to our history as the English heritage: so where is the Irish, Scottish and Chinese symbolism on the flag? The very early emergence of the Australian accent in colonial Sydney was a result of the blending of all the accents of the people:mostly Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh, however with some Aboriginal words also adopted into the language.
We should change the Australian flag urgently for the all the following reasons:
- The Union jack in the corner is completely irrelevant now.
- the flag doesn't reflect our history well - see above and also the fact that we didn't fight under this flag in World War I anyway (it was different then)
- the current flag has been adopted by racists - and Australia Day is also becoming their festival and should be dumped in favour of Federation Day (January 1) when we really became a nation (not just a colony)
- the flag completely fails to identify the country overseas - its almost exactly the same as the NZ flag and numerous other South Pacific nation's flags - hence the use of the boxing kangaroo flag at the Winter olympics in Canada - the only way the Australian team could actually identify itself
- if Canada could come up with a wonderful, unifying and distinctive design years ago, don't we have the imagination and ability to do so also?
- Aboriginal people, if consulted, would surely be willing to suggest some appropriate symbol for inclusion on a new Australian flag (Note for all those who aren't aware, Aboriginal people do not want their current Aboriginal flag appropriated for a new national flag. It's theirs and they want to keep it).

JohnJ
I agree we need a new flag, sooner not later.
All we need to do is remove the 'jack'
Move the Federation Star up to the centre between top & bottom and slightly enlarge it
Maintain the Southern Cross as is

Thus the blue field represents our clear skies and clean waters
The Southern Cross our position on the globe
The Federation Star the coming togeather of the original six colonies under one federation, hence the seven pointed star - our history

John L:

Your 'big star flag' will look like so many others. Big stars are a monotonous feature of countless national flags.

Also, the history of this continent did not start with Federation, as you suggest.

Perhaps you were a student at the Ray Martin School of History? Ray was once suspected of being a follower of that crepuscular history revisionist, Paul Keating.

Yes Australian history didn't start with Federation - it started 50,000 or so years ago with the first migration of homo sapiens out of Africa. However, the point is, what aspects of Australian history are worth symbolising on a flag - surely not the place becoming a colonial outpost of the British empire, a dumping ground for convicts? Instead, we should wish to celebrate, in our flag, in a unifying manner: Australia being a nation where one of the oldest living cultures on Earth has survived, which became independant and prosperous despite such inauspicious circumstances in 1788; which was one of the first true democracies on Earth (along with NZ, as one of the 1st nations to give women the vote), with a great egalitarian tradition (one blot being the failure to give Aborigines the vote until 1967).
These are the sorts of things we should look to incorporate in our flag. I don't disagree that the Federation star and the southern cross could also stay on it. Some imagination people please...we need a new flag to represent Australia in the 21st century which celebrates things about Australia worth celebrating.