Australia has two officially proclaimed Indigenous flags, and the younger of them came out of a design competition on Thursday Island. Bernard Namok's flag for the Torres Strait Islander people, chosen in 1992 from more than a hundred entries, puts a white feathered headdress and a five-pointed star on stripes of green, black, and blue. Three years after it first flew, the Governor-General proclaimed it a "Flag of Australia" under the Flags Act 1953. Namok did not live to see that. He died in 1993 at 31, a year after his design was presented to his people.
A competition on Thursday Island
The Torres Strait sits between the tip of Cape York and the coast of Papua New Guinea, a scatter of islands whose people are Melanesian, culturally distinct from Aboriginal Australians on the mainland. By the early 1990s the Islander rights movement wanted a symbol of its own. The Island Coordinating Council, a Queensland statutory body representing the island communities, ran a design competition in 1992, and Bernard Namok of Thursday Island won it.
His son, Bernard Namok Jr, was ten years old at the time and has described his father sketching at home on Thursday Island in the evenings, working through drafts of the design. The finished flag was presented to the people of the Torres Strait on 29 May 1992 at the sixth Torres Strait Cultural Festival. In June 1992 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission gave it formal recognition and equal standing with the Aboriginal Flag. The timing mattered: only a week after the festival, on 3 June 1992, the High Court handed down the Mabo decision, which began in these same islands and overturned the doctrine of terra nullius. The flag arrived at the exact moment the Torres Strait entered Australian legal history.
Reading the flag
The design is symmetrical and precise. Green stripes run along the top and bottom edges for the land. A wide blue panel fills the centre for the sea, which is the setting of Islander life and the highway between islands. Separating green from blue are two thin black stripes for the people themselves, the same black that carries that meaning on the Aboriginal Flag.
At the centre, in white, is a Dhari, the feathered headdress worn by Torres Strait Islander men in dance and ceremony. It is probably the single most recognisable object in Islander material culture, and rendering it in silhouette gave the flag an emblem no other flag in the world has. Beneath the Dhari sits a white five-pointed star. Each point is one of the five major island groups: the Northern, Eastern, Western, Central, and Southern divisions. The star also refers to peace, and to celestial navigation, the skill that let Islanders cross open water between islands for generations. White itself is read as peace.
The flag is usually made in 2:3 proportions, and official reproduction guidance specifies Pantone colours for the green and blue. It is a busy design by vexillological standards, five stripes and two charges, but every element is doing work, and it reads clearly at a distance.
Official status, twice
On 14 July 1995 the Governor-General, Bill Hayden, proclaimed the Torres Strait Islander Flag a "Flag of Australia" under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953, in the same ceremony that gave the Aboriginal Flag the same status. The proclamation recognised the two flags as flags of Australia's two distinct Indigenous peoples, to be flown with equal prominence.
Then came a bureaucratic stumble. Under sunsetting rules for legislative instruments, the 1995 proclamation lapsed on 1 January 2008, an administrative oversight that briefly stripped both Indigenous flags of their formal status. Nobody had intended it, and on 25 January 2008 the flags were re-proclaimed. The episode changed nothing in practice, but it is a reminder that the flag's status rests on an instrument of executive government rather than an act of parliament.
Today the flag flies on government buildings alongside the Australian National Flag and the Aboriginal Flag during NAIDOC Week and other designated occasions, at the Torres Strait Regional Authority, and across the islands themselves.
The copyright question
Like the Aboriginal Flag before 2022, the Torres Strait Islander Flag is a copyrighted artistic work. The rights are administered by the Torres Strait Island Regional Council, the local government body that succeeded the Island Coordinating Council. Flying the flag requires no permission, but reproducing it does: the council asks for a written request, acknowledgement of Bernard Namok as designer, and use of the original colour specifications.
When the Australian government bought out the Aboriginal Flag's copyright in January 2022 and put that design in the public domain, attention turned to the Torres Strait flag, which remains under copyright. Bernard Namok Jr has said publicly that it still is not clear to him who should own the rights to his father's design, and the question of whether the flag should follow the Aboriginal Flag into public ownership stays open. For now, the arrangement is the reverse of its sibling flag's ending: an official national flag whose reproduction is controlled by a regional council.
Namok's early death gives the flag a particular weight in the Strait. He was 31 when he died in 1993, and the flag is his monument. His son has retold the story of its creation for schoolchildren, and the design he sketched on Thursday Island now flies from Parliament House to the smallest island communities his father's headdress and star were drawn for.
References
[1] Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), "The Torres Strait Flag," official page. https://www.tsra.gov.au/the-torres-strait/torres-strait-flag/
[2] Torres Strait Island Regional Council, "Torres Strait Islander flag" (copyright and reproduction guidance). https://tsirc.qld.gov.au/about-us/our-region/torres-strait-islander-flag/
[3] Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), "Torres Strait Islander flag" and "Bernard Namok." https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/torres-strait-islander-flag
[4] Flags Act 1953 (Cth), section 5; proclamations of 14 July 1995 and 25 January 2008. Federal Register of Legislation, Australia.
[5] National Museum of Australia, Defining Moments Digital Classroom, "Torres Strait Islander flag." https://digital-classroom.nma.gov.au/images/torres-strait-islander-flag
[6] SBS NITV, "Bernard was 10 when his father designed the Torres Strait flag. Now he's sharing the story through a children's book." https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/bernard-was-10-when-his-father-designed-the-torres-strait-flag-now-hes-sharing-the-story-through-a-childrens-book/z6lybn9gy
[7] SBS NITV, "Aboriginal flag copyright controversy flutters across the Torres Strait" (2019). https://sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2019/06/26/aboriginal-torres-strait-flag-copyright