The Australian Aboriginal Flag spent decades as an official national flag that Aboriginal people could not always legally reproduce. Harold Thomas, a Luritja artist, designed it in 1971 for a land rights march in Adelaide, and it moved quickly from protest banner to one of Australia's most recognised symbols. It was proclaimed an official "Flag of Australia" under the Flags Act 1953 in 1995, but its reproduction stayed under commercial licence until January 2022, when the Australian government bought the copyright and placed the flag in the public domain.
The 1971 march and Harold Thomas
Harold Thomas, a Luritja man from Central Australia and an art lecturer in Adelaide, designed the flag in 1971 for National Aborigines Day Observance Committee (NADOC) activities. It first flew on 12 July 1971 at Victoria Square, known in Kaurna language as Tarntanyangga, during a land rights demonstration. Thomas has said the design came to him intuitively, out of his identity and his connection to the land, sky, and people. He did not base it on any existing flag.
It spread fast. Within months it had moved well beyond Adelaide, and the moment that fixed it in the national consciousness came on 26 January 1972, when four Aboriginal men erected the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra with the flag flying above it. The Tent Embassy became one of the defining acts of the Aboriginal rights movement and, in various forms, still stands. Flying there turned a regional protest banner into a pan-Aboriginal symbol of sovereignty, crossing language groups and regional boundaries in a way few symbols manage.
Land, sun, and people
The design splits horizontally into two equal halves, black on top and red ochre below, with a yellow disc sitting where the two bands meet. Black represents Aboriginal peoples, past, present, and future. The yellow circle is the sun, giver of life and protector. Red is the earth itself, the ochre used in ceremonies for millennia, and the spiritual bond Aboriginal people hold with the land.
The palette does more than symbolise those things in the abstract. The colours are the natural pigments, ochre, charcoal, and clay, that Aboriginal peoples have used in art and ceremony for tens of thousands of years, so the flag sits inside an artistic tradition far older than the idea of national flags.
Vexillologists rate it among the best-designed flags in the world for its clarity, balance, and density of meaning. You can recognise it from a hundred metres away, and a child can draw it from memory. Thomas has always emphasised that it represents all Aboriginal people across the continent rather than any single nation or language group.
The copyright fight
Harold Thomas, as the flag's creator, held copyright under Australian intellectual property law. In 1997 the Federal Court confirmed it in Thomas v Brown, establishing that the flag belonged to Thomas rather than to the public, the government, or Aboriginal people collectively.
Thomas licensed reproduction rights to various companies. WAM Clothing held rights for apparel, Flagworld held manufacturing rights for physical flags. The result was that Aboriginal organisations, schools, and sporting bodies could face legal threats for printing the flag on jerseys, merchandise, or promotional materials, so the people the flag was meant to represent could not always use it.
The AFL's Indigenous Round became a flashpoint. Clubs and players wanted the flag on their guernseys to honour Aboriginal culture, and licensing restrictions made that a legal minefield. By 2019 the #FreeTheFlag campaign had spread across social media, arguing that a symbol of cultural identity should not sit behind commercial licensing deals, and it drew support from athletes, politicians, artists, and the general public.
Resolution came on 25 January 2022, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the Australian Government had purchased the copyright from Harold Thomas for a reported $20.05 million, transferring it to the Commonwealth and placing the flag in the public domain. Thomas supported the deal, saying it ensured the flag would be free for all Aboriginal people to use.
The episode left harder questions behind it. Should a collective cultural symbol be subject to individual copyright at all? Did Thomas, as sole creator, deserve compensation? And what does it mean for a government to buy a people's flag and then give it back to them?
Official recognition and protocol
The Aboriginal Flag was proclaimed an official "Flag of Australia" on 14 July 1995 by the Governor-General under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953, alongside the Torres Strait Islander Flag. The dual recognition acknowledged Australia's two distinct Indigenous peoples within the country's formal symbols.
Since 2022 the flag has flown permanently on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, replacing the NSW state flag, a decision that carried real symbolic weight and some political controversy. It also flies on Australian government buildings alongside the national flag and the Torres Strait Islander Flag on designated days, including NAIDOC Week and National Reconciliation Week, and appears at Australian of the Year ceremonies, parliamentary openings, and sporting events such as the AFL Indigenous Round.
There are no separate statutory protocols beyond general flag etiquette under the Flags Act. It is treated with the same respect as the Australian National Flag, and in practice it is frequently displayed as an act of welcome and acknowledgement of Aboriginal people as the First Nations of Australia.
Beyond the flagpole
Walk through any Australian city and you will find the flag painted on walls, printed on T-shirts, projected onto landmarks, woven into public art, and tattooed on skin. For many Aboriginal Australians it is a unifying emblem across the continent's hundreds of distinct language groups and nations, providing a shared visual identity while leaving room for the diversity it covers.
It appears at Sorry Day commemorations, at protests, at funerals of Aboriginal leaders, and at celebrations of Aboriginal achievement. It has influenced international Indigenous solidarity movements and is recognised globally as a symbol of First Nations resilience. Its relationship with the Torres Strait Islander Flag, designed by Bernard Namok in 1992, is complementary: together the two represent the full breadth of Indigenous Australia.
The flag's own history has followed the same arc as the movement it came from. It started as a protest banner at a land rights march, became a national symbol, had its ownership contested in courts and on social media, and was finally bought by a government and released to the public.
References
[1] Australian Government, National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA), "Aboriginal Flag" official page. https://www.niaa.gov.au
[2] Flags Act 1953 (Cth), Section 5, Proclamation of the Aboriginal Flag, 14 July 1995. Federal Register of Legislation, Australia.
[3] Thomas v Brown & Anor (1997) 1507 FCA, Federal Court of Australia. Judgment confirming Harold Thomas's copyright over the Aboriginal Flag design.
[4] Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), resources on the Aboriginal Flag and Tent Embassy history. https://aiatsis.gov.au
[5] Australian Government media release, 25 January 2022, "Aboriginal Flag freed for Australians," Prime Minister's Office.
[6] National Museum of Australia, "Aboriginal Tent Embassy" digital exhibition and collection records. https://www.nma.gov.au
[7] Foley, Gary, The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State (2013).
[8] Smith, Whitney, Flags Through the Ages and Across the World (1975), early vexillological documentation of the Aboriginal Flag.
[9] NAIDOC Committee, official history of National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee and the flag's early use.