The Aboriginal flag, for the first time, can now be freely used by all Australians.
That’s because Harold Thomas, the man who designed the flag, agreed to transfer its copyright to the Commonwealth after a prolonged legal dispute over the flag’s use.
It means the red, yellow and black flag that has long been a symbol of Aboriginal Australia, as Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt put it, “now belongs to everyone, and no-one can take it away”.
Who is Harold Thomas?
Harold Thomas, the son of a Luritja woman and Wombai man, was born in Alice Springs in 1947.
He was taken from his family at the age of seven, a reality he has said deeply impacted his life and work.
In 2016, Mr Thomas won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award with a painting about the Stolen Generations.
“That’s been with me all my life, because it’s a situation that my parents would’ve gone through,” he said at the time.
After he was fostered to a family in South Australia, Mr Thomas won a scholarship to the South Australian School of Art at the age of 17.
There, in 1969, he became known as the first Aboriginal person to graduate from an Australian art school.
Mr Thomas moved to the rural Darwin suburb of Humpty Doo nearly 30 years ago, where he still lives.
In this time he has spent his working life as a professional painter.
The history of the Aboriginal flag
It was 1970, the year after Mr Thomas graduated from the South Australian School of Art, that he designed the flag.
“[The flag] was brought about by my experiences as an art school student, with my time among the greatest collection of Aboriginal material culture at the South Australian Museum,” he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday.
“When I created the flag, I created it as a symbol of unity and pride. That pride we have for our identity that harks back to the birthing of our dreaming, to the present existence and beyond.”
The flag was first flown at a land rights rally in Adelaide in July 1971.
Mr Thomas said he created the flag to lead a demonstration at the National Aboriginal Day Observance Committee (now known as the National Aboriginal and Islanders Day Observance Committee) march.
“In my university days there was a question of identity amongst Aboriginal people,” Mr Thomas has said of the cultural environment that birthed the flag.
By 1972 the flag was flown at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra.
Since the flag became widely recognisable it has been embraced, politicised and monetised, the latter of which led to a vexed copyright controversy that saw anyone who wanted to use the flag under a legal requirement to seek permission or pay a fee.
Before the landmark deal that transferred the flag’s copyright to the Commonwealth, the rights to the image belonged to WAM Clothing, a non-Indigenous business that had exclusive rights to reproduce it on clothing.
Now, after three years of negotiation, Mr Thomas said he hopes the democratisation of the flag will “provide comfort to all Aboriginal people and Australians to use the flag”.
“I am grateful that my art is appreciated by so many, and that it has come to represent something so powerful to so many,” he said.
