Hello followers and fellow Steemians welcome to my review of the Australian flag! This is the 9th flag I will be covering in my series to cover most of the flags of the world! I hope you enjoy the ride, if you stay long enough I assure that you will also start to like flags a lot! just like me!
The plan is to go ahead and try to cover most of the flags in alphabetical order! So we still have long ways to go! Hope you stay for the ride!
Today's Flag is the Flag of Australia!
The Australian flag is a defaced (in vexillology this simply means a flag that is a modified version of another flag) British blue ensign, it contains the Union Jack on the upper left corner and a large seven point star below the Union Jack, this star is also known by the name of "The Commonwealth Star"
On the right side you can find a representation of the Southern Cross Constellation also known as Crux. This representation is made out of five white stars. This flag was adopted on the 23 of February 1901.
Meanings
The Union Jack on the top left represents Australia's historical links with the United Kingdom.
The white seven pointed star represents the unity of the six states and territories of Australia.
The Crux formation of star represents Australia's position on the southern hemisphere, the former name of the Crux is actually "Crux Australis".
Other Flags
There's one variant of the current Australian Flag that uses the red ensign instead of the blue ensign.
A portion of the Australian population has been unhappy with the selection of the Australian flag since its creation in 1901, one of the biggest critics at the time was the Bulletin magazine with the following statement:
a staled réchauffé of the British flag, with no artistic virtue, no national significance... Minds move slowly: and Australia is still Britain's little boy. What more natural than that he should accept his father's cut-down garments, – lacking the power to protest, and only dimly realising his will. That bastard flag is a true symbol of the bastard state of Australian opinion.
In the 1830's there was an attempt to create a national flag for Australia, this flag was known as the Australian Federation flag. It was called this way because at the time Australia was composed from many different British colonies on the island of Australia, similar to the thirteen colonies in the United States.
There's also two other "oficial Australian Flags that hold a legal and political status, one of them being the Australian Aboriginal flag, designed by Australian aboriginal artist Harold Thomas in 1971 and adopted by the government as the aboriginal flag on the 14th of July 1995.
And there's also the Torres Strait islander people's flag, which is another legal Australian flag used to represent the aboriginal people that live on the Torres Strait, which is a group of islands located between Australia and Papua New Guinea. This flag was also adopted on the 14th of July 1995.
Facts
Despite Australia's massive size of 2.9 million square miles making it the 6th largest country in the world, Australian population is only around 24.5 million people. If you compare it to the state of New York in the United States, Australia is 53 times larger than New York and barely beats by around 3 to 4 million people in population. New York's population is around 20 million people.
Australian Aboriginals have one of the oldest found records on Earth, dating their migration to the island around 40 to 60 thousand years ago!
Despite the distance, Australia holds the largest Greek population outside of Greece!
Location
Australia is located on the continent of Oceania, to the south of South East Asia.
Thanks for reading this far down! I hope you enjoyed the read :-D, Help me improve by leaving a comment with suggestions and if you liked it please upvote, reesteem and follow me for more flags in the future! Here's a list of my other posts if you feel like checking them out!
