Use
Many buildings in Australia fly the Aboriginal flag as well as the Australian flag, the Melbourne Trades Hall being an example. Various councils in Australian towns fly the Aboriginal flag from the town halls, such as Bendigo (adopted in 2005). The first city council to fly the Aboriginal flag was Newcastle City Council in 1977.
The Aboriginal flag sometimes substitutes the Union Flag in proposed new Australian flag designs. Such flags are presented in science fiction as futuristic Australian flags, as in the film Event Horizon, where it was worn by Sam Neill. Many Aboriginal people object to this use, including Harold Thomas, who said “Our flag is not a secondary thing. It stands on its own, not to be placed as an adjunct to any other thing. It shouldn't be treated that way.”
The Australian Aboriginal Flag is celebrated in the controversial painting The First Supper (1988) by Susan Dorothea White where the central figure is an Aboriginal woman who displays the flag on her T-shirt.
The sale of condoms in the colours of the Aboriginal flag won a public health award in 2005 for the initiative's success in improving safe sex practices among young Indigenous people.
The flag was to be part of the logo on Google Australia's home page on Australia Day 2010, but the company was forced to modify the design due to Harold Thomas demanding payment if Google were to use it.
Read more about this topic: Australian Aboriginal Flag
Famous quotes containing the word use:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)