Most people brandishing various versions of the Australian flag at protest marches would have “no idea” of their history, says law expert Joe McIntyre. The recent anti-immigration March for Australia included neo-Nazis and others from the far right, intermingled with anti-lockdown activists, sovereign citizens and conspiracy theorists.
Flyers for the event explicitly said “no foreign flags”, but asked people to bring the blue or red ensign, or the Eureka flag.
“The reality is these flags are just symbols they have appropriated,” says McIntyre, an expert in law and “pseudo-law” from the University of South Australia.
He says pseudo-law is the broad umbrella covering sovereign citizens, “freemen of the lands” or “people’s assemblies”, but their false beliefs are also used by anti-vaxxers, white nationalists and people in the “freedom” or anti-authority movement. They are filled with “righteousness”, he says, and believe that “they have access to the ‘true laws’ and anyone against them is corrupt or complicit”.
“They use pseudo-legal arguments, legislation and judgments so it looks like they are doing law,” McIntyre says. “The arguments are adopted by [other] groups because they can be useful.
“These fringe groups, the pseudo-legal groups, had a language set and a set of knowledge that was attractive come Covid, because it seemed to offer a promise of how to avoid public health measures.”
The Australian federal police has also pointed out that the sovereign citizen movement is “co-opting or overlapping with other movements (anti-vax, conspiracy, far right)”.
And these anti-authority groups have adopted versions of the Australian flag to signal their beliefs.
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“It doesn’t matter what the original purpose was. Most followers would have no idea of any of the history,” McIntyre says.
“They know this is a visually striking symbol of anti-authoritarian protest. Once it gets a critical mass, it becomes a critical symbol.”
Red ensign
After colonisation, Australia’s flag was the union jack, and today’s Australian flag and its red counterpart feature the union jack along with the southern cross.
What we think of today as the Australian flag – the blue ensign – was selected from a design competition on 3 September 1901, after federation.
But it was the official government flag, not a flag for the people that they could string up in their back yard.
Ralph Kelly, a vexillologist and the president of Flags Australia, says he sees sovereign citizens and others flying the 1901 red ensign, which has a six-pointed Commonwealth Star (it was later changed to a seven-pointed star, six for the states and one for the territories).
“In the early days there was widespread use of the red ensign, because that was the flag that could be used by the public,” he says.
“In 1941, restrictions on the private use of the blue flag were removed and it wasn’t until 1954, with the enactment of the Flags Act, that it was officially designated the national flag.”
Politicians including the Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and the One Nation senator Pauline Hanson draped themselves in the blue ensign on Wednesday, marking national flag day.
It’s an “inconvenient truth”, Kelly says, that 3 September marks the day the design was picked but that people “kind of ignore the fact that ordinary people weren’t allowed to use it”.
McIntyre says the private merchant navy used the red ensign and there was a history of citizens using it to symbolise their identity as Australian rather than British subjects.
He says in the “bonkers” mishmash of pseudo-laws used by sovereign citizens, there is a faulty notion that Australia is under admiralty, or maritime law – which also might explain the use of the red ensign.
Among the critics of this kind of use of the flag is the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), which said in a Facebook post: “During WWII, these mariners lost their lives to a fight against Nazis and fascism.
“The imagery and emotion these flags invoke and the history they represent have in recent years been stolen from hard-working Australians to undermine community cohesion. This first began during anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests and has proliferated since into various rightwing causes.”
Blue ensign
McIntyre says that in the wake of the Cronulla riots – an outpouring of racist violence and an event at which many toted the blue ensign – the meaning of the official Australian flag morphed.
“Thirty years ago, draping yourself in the Australian flag wasn’t seen as nationalistic. It didn’t have those undertones,” he says.
“Post-Cronulla riot, it takes a very different undertone.”
Graeme Davison, an emeritus professor of history at Monash University, told the ABC that when worn like clothing, the flag could have “sinister” implications, while the Multicultural Council of Tasmania chief executive, Andrew Finch, said the Australian flag “should never, ever be weaponised or treated with disrespect at any time”.
Kelly says people could also be waving the flag as a way of “expressing loyalty to the country … but not obedience to or agreement with what the government is doing”.
Eureka flag
The Eureka, or southern cross, flag is the symbol of the 1854 Eureka stockade, in which miners rebelled against the government of the day. It is seen as a defining moment for fairness and democracy.
McIntyre says the flag was “a symbol originally of union movements and workers’ rights and popular sovereignty” that has “been appropriated by people who say ‘I will do what I want’. So we see it transformed.”
The MUA says the Eureka flag “belongs to the trade union movement and represents working-class struggle against oppression”.
Kelly says while leftwing unions celebrate the Eureka flag as “the flag of the workers”, there are also rightwing people “celebrating it as a symbol of the miners as entrepreneurial gold diggers who made the effort”.
“It’s also a sign of Australian democracy, Australian efforts … and Australian nationalism,” he says.
Kelly says that in the March for Australia he saw another variation of the Eureka flag with added words: “When injustice becomes law, resistance is duty”.
Another version available online has the words: “I will associate with whoever the fuck I like”.
Clayton Chin, an associate professor in political theory at the University of Melbourne, writes in the Conversation that the flag has previously been used by white supremacists and that its history provides “fertile ground” for some groups.
“The use of the flag by protesters allows them to frame themselves as similarly oppressed and unheard, resisting an unjust agenda and government” and is an attempt at “symbolic shift”, he writes.
“Those who fly it wish to move a politics of anti-immigration, and potentially a politics of neo-nazism, to the centre of the Australian political community and national identity.”
Upside-down flag
An upside-down flag is a distress signal, historically used by ships to indicate they were in trouble. Now, anti-authority groups use it to suggest that the nation is heading for the rocks.
“From the time when we had sailing ships, and before we had radio, if a ship was in distress, in fear of sinking, they’d flip the flag upside down,” Kelly says.
“So [for the protesters] the upside-down flag is signalling distress at the state of the nation.”
The Royal Australian Navy uses a white ensign, the air force a light blue ensign with a leaping kangaroo, and a light-blue version with a dark blue cross is used in civil aviation, but these do not appear to have been appropriated by any protest movements.
“It would be interesting if we had an Australian flag rather than a colonial relic,” Kelly says.
• This article was amended on 6 September 2025. The 1901 red ensign has a six-pointed Commonwealth Star, not a five-pointed star as a previous version incorrectly stated.
