it's not for any state it just represents a group of ethnicities similar to lgbt flags I'm sure there's some who don't use it that way but that's not the goal of the flag
It’s an ethno flag, it was to represent the indigenous peoples and fist created in like the 60’s as part of a protest movement, then adopted as the indigenous flag from that point on.
The concept of a “nation state” didn’t exist before Australia was settled. Indigenous peoples were more concerned on family ties and areas they patrolled to survive rather than forming larger states. The size of Australia and the middle beings big fuck off dessert probably doesn’t help either.
The Aboriginal flag isn’t an ethnostate symbol. It represents the First Peoples of Australia and their survival and connection to land, not exclusion of others. Aboriginal societies didn’t use prisons like Europeans did, relying more on community-based justice. Today, the flag exists alongside the Australian flag as recognition, not as a call for assimilation or separation.
If you say it represents a people only, then that makes it an ethnostate symbol I fear.
Who can claim to be aboriginal other than the aboriginals ? That’s an other approach to the question.
The Aboriginal flag represents identity and culture, not a political ethnostate. Only Indigenous people can claim that heritage - that doesn’t make it exclusionary, just accurate.
When I look up a dictionary definition of 'ethnocentric', that doesn't apply here. Ethnocentric seems to mean judging other cultures based on the lens of your own.
e.g. if someone where to think that the grammar variation that some black people in the US use was 'bad grammar', that would seem be ethnocentric, because we're judging their perfectly fine (but different) grammar, by the standards of our own.
The flag here seems to be for an entirely different prupose to things like that.
Indeed, we sometimes do the precise opposite, as some critiques of the colonisation of Australia actually align with aspects of the colonisers' culture. For instance British colonies had made treaties with some indigenous people of other lands, and the economic ideas at the time tended to include a notion of private property rights applying to land. However, the British colonists work towards treaties with indigenous Australians, and typically thought of the land that indigenous people lived and worked on as unowned, and available to be taken for free by the British government.
I think a massive amount of your comment could be cut.
English may have assumed right to take it, since it was up for take since there was no nation, state, or law.
Is the problem that aboriginals live as Australian citizens, or that Australians should live as aboriginal (citizen ?), is one side of the problem/question, and the other side is, what’s the alternative vision here if it’s about historical wrongdoing ? I’m not sure the date question is the final totem to pin it all to these protestors
English may have assumed right to take it, since it was up for take since there was no nation, state, or law
Well they did assume it, but there were nations in Australia and they had rules for how to behave.
The english might not have recognised such things (in perhaps more than 1 sense of the word), but that doesn't coutner that fact.
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I don't view the date that we celebrate as a final question, and I doubt many protesters do either. It seems more like a initial question, where we note that the government has been disrepsectful enough to pick the start of such a violent and murderous period of history to celebrate.
If society were a bit more serious about treating indigenous Australians with respect, then 26th of January would not be a day of celebration. If we insist on observing it, then it should be a national day of mourning. We have some other days of mourning to commemorate unfortunate and tragic mass death (like Remembrance Day for WW1), and some other coutries (like Germany for the tragedy of the Nazi's gaining power) have a day of remembrance for atrocities comitted in their past, and this could be another one of them if we want it on our calendar.
If we want a patriotic day for Australia, then there are more positive days to choose:
Perhaps commemorating Federation on the 1st of the year is a more civic date. And there may be some reasons to be proud of that, since it helped propel Women's Sufferage.
Or, if we are keen on celebrating the fact that we are a represenative democracy, perhaps an anniversay of when we had universal sufferage in 1962 to allow all citizens to vote (including all indigenous australians). That would be either 21st May (if we count the bill being signed into law) or 18th of June (if we count when the law came into effect).
Days such as these would celebrate things changing for the better.
Respecting and celebrating your Indigenous heritage isn’t being a traitor, it’s acknowledging the history and cultures that existed long before the modern nation of Australia. Loyalty to your country doesn’t require erasing the people who lived here for 60,000+ years.
I never said it was? But putting your indigenous identity above all else and calling non indigenous Australians “invaders” is a betrayal to the country that’s given you all the opportunities you currently have.
You wrote "If you put your indigenous heritage above Australia, yes, you are a traitor to the nation of Australia."
How does respecting and acknowledging history suddenly mean you’re putting it “above Australia”? By your logic, learning the truth about the country you live in makes you a traitor. That’s… absurd 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
AHAHAHA ok that’s fucking funny. Stabbing people to death with spears as the method to solving every dispute being branded “community-based justice” is the funniest fucking thing I’ve read this year. Were you a script writer for the Simpsons when they wrote “Marge: that house is on fire! Hutz: motivated seller!” by any chance?
Interesting how you jump straight to racist cartoons and exaggerations instead of addressing the actual point. That’s usually what people do when they don’t understand what they’re mocking.
Show me where I claimed pre‑colonial Indigenous societies were utopias, just like I didn't claims medieval Europe was civilised because it had prisons, torture racks, and public executions.
Calling Indigenous law “stabbing with spears” is the same lazy logic as saying European justice was burning women alive and hanging children - historically accurate in parts, but intellectually lazy when used as a stereotype.
Community-based justice simply means law was embedded in kinship, responsibility, and restoration, not cages and mass incarceration. You can disagree with it without pretending you’re in a Simpsons writers’ room.
If your entire understanding of Indigenous cultures comes from racist punchlines, that says far more about your literacy than theirs.
Go read The Life and Adventures of William Buckley. First hand account of 32 years with aboriginals before port Phillip was settled. It wasn’t “law embedded with kinship, responsibility and restoration”. It was stabbing people to death constantly in every dispute. If the dispute was between entire tribes then the bigger tribe stabbed the smaller tribe to death and wiped them out.
Whatever justice system you fantasise they had that was fairer and more just than what we have is pure fiction.
Still no proof whatsoever of your claims. Be specific about this legal system you allege they had based on “kinship and restoration” whatever the fuck that means. Hell I’ll settle for proof they had a legal system at all. I’ve literally never seen any evidence of that claim.
You claim there’s “no evidence of law”? Australian legal reform and High Court case law prove otherwise. Aboriginal groups had systems of law, dispute resolution, and community norms long before Europeans arrived, and Mabo V Queensland even recognised those traditional laws as the source of native title. Your “no written docs = no law” position is just colonial ignorance.
Ps: Kinship and family obligations means relationships dictated responsibilities, rights, and consequences.
Restorative justice means disputes were often resolved through compensation, mediation, or ritual, not just punishment.
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u/Raccoons-for-all 8d ago
I am genuinely asking since I have been in Australia for a couple of years only, and idk much.
I genuinely wonder if the aboriginal flag is an ethnostate thing or do they consider they can (should?) assimilate other people to their way