Flag of Australia

How to read it

The Flags Act 1953 (assented to by Queen Elizabeth II on 14 February 1954) declares the blue flag the Australian National Flag and sets out the design in Schedule 1: the Union Jack in the upper quarter next to the staff; a large white star in the centre of the lower quarter, pointing to the centre of St George’s Cross in the Union Jack; and five white stars representing the Southern Cross in the half of the flag away from the staff. The Act gives each star’s position and size as fractions of the flag’s width: the Commonwealth Star is three-tenths of the width across, four stars of the Southern Cross have seven points and are one-seventh across, and the small star, Epsilon Crucis, has five points and is one-twelfth across. The flag can be replaced only by a new flag chosen by a majority of voters in a vote held in every state and territory (section 3). The design was chosen in a public competition and first flown on 3 September 1901, from the Exhibition Building in Melbourne.

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New Zealand flag vs Australia

Both are blue with the Union Jack in the top corner and the Southern Cross on the fly. New Zealand’s flag has four red five-pointed stars with white borders, and no star under the Union Jack. Australia’s stars are white: five in the Southern Cross, one of them small with five points and the other four with seven, and the large seven-pointed Commonwealth Star under the Union Jack.

Even Parliament House in Canberra has mixed them up: in September 2026 it flew two New Zealand flags by mistake in a display of 44 flags marking the day the Australian flag was first flown, 1News reported.

How the flag was chosen

Judges appointed by the Commonwealth government went through more than 30,000 entries in August and September 1901 and chose a design submitted in five of them. King Edward VII approved it, slightly simplified, in 1902. The Commonwealth Star then had six points, one for each state.

For decades the Union Flag was still regarded as the national flag, and there was confusion over whether the blue or the red Australian flag could be used, and by whom. The Menzies government proclaimed the blue flag the national flag in December 1950 and then passed the Flags Act. Section 8 of the Act keeps the right to fly the Union Jack.

The red version

The same design on a red field is the Australian Red Ensign (section 4 of the Act), first authorised for merchant ships registered in Australia in 1903. Within the British Empire, blue ensigns marked government ships and red ensigns privately owned ones.