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?