Our national flag needs to represent the characteristics of our land, people and history in a strong visual metaphor.

 

We have a unique story, one built on strength through adversity, on having faith and seeing beauty through fear.

 

Dorothea Mackellar writes of this in her immortal poem 'My Country' and the most famous verse, the second... Ref.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

 

 

A visual metaphor of the Australia Spirit: Flourishing Through Adversity

 

In the red centre of our continent the stark desert landscape inspires awe, but also fear.  Only the peoples who know the land's secrets will survive...

 

Through year upon year of ceaseless drought it seems life is an impossible dream, beauty an alien concept.  Adversity and the fight for existence is our only companion.

 

Then it comes.  Miraculous and proud.  The rain washes the landscape into a sea of colour, greenery and wildflower explode into life and stretch to the far horizon; a theatre of endless fertility from a barren nothingness; fear replaced with joy; faith rewarded with beauty.