Australia Gay Flag
Regional Pride Flag ·
Six rainbow stripes with the Southern Cross in a blue canton and, in the fly, a gold kangaroo, a seven-pointed star and a silhouette of the continent. The Union Jack of the national flag is absent. One of the national designs Greg Gomes marked as his own. [1]
Key facts
- Designer
- Greg Gomes
- Created
- Published online
- Published online by 2002
- Aspect Ratio
- 3:5 · apparent
- Ratio Notes
- Measured from the recovered artwork, 500 by 300 pixels. The page does not list this file's size, so the copy held here is identified by its filename and its position on the page. Published as apparent: measured from a served thumbnail, not from a specification.
- Represented Identity
- LGBTQ
Status Variant
Archive categories Regional and Language-Specific Pride Flags
Overview
Six rainbow stripes fill the field, with a blue canton carrying the five stars of the Southern Cross over the upper hoist and, in the fly, a gold kangaroo, a blue seven-pointed star, a yellow disc and a violet silhouette of the mainland and Tasmania on a red ground. The Union Jack of the Australian national flag does not appear anywhere in the image. Greg Gomes published it on the national page and marked it as his own design; the file held here is the one that page served, 500 by 300 pixels. [1] No physical use has been documented.
Identity & Context
- Represented Identity
- LGBTQ
- National Context
- Australia
Creators
The Creator
Greg Gomes
Designer and publisher
Greg Gomes is credited as the designer of the flags marked on his own pages, and as the publisher of the two sites that carried them. He ran Gay Journey at gayjourney.com, whose footer carries a copyright range beginning in 2002, and the later Gay Flags of the World at gayflags.biz, 2005 to 2011. Both published from American Dimensions, PO Box 573, McKinney, Texas 75070, and both ran the same four series of gay flags: general, national, United States state, and Canadian provincial. A post-office box is a mailing address. It does not establish where Gomes lived, and no source states where any of these files was drawn.
He marked his own designs with a symbol before the flag name, which is what separates the flags he made from the flags he catalogued. The marking is per flag and not every flag carries it: of the forty-seven on the national page, Azerbaijan, Canada and the United States do not. [1] His terms for reuse were set out on the same page, in his own words: the marked designs were his and Gay Journey’s property and protected by copyright; anyone wishing to use one was to contact him and say where it would be used, credit the design to him, and make the flag a clickable link back to gay_flags.htm. He also stated that the marked designs were not for sale through the page. [1]
Outside his own sites the collection was noticed twice on Flags of the World. Francisco Santos wrote on 14 May 2003 that GayJourney.COM carried “lots of rainbows: from Argentina to Wales, EU, UNO, US states, Canadian provinces and general gay flags,” and added that “perhaps not all of these flags are actually used in the real word.” Richard Knipel wrote on 14 June 2004 that most of the flags, “with ‘GJ’ underneath, were designed by the site’s author, Greg Gomes,” and that it was “hard to say how many of these are flying somewhere.” [2] Tomislav Todorović, reading the state series in 2015, recorded that the Wyoming flag was “not marked as his creation,” unlike most images.
One property of the collection recurs across the individual flags and is recorded here rather than on each of them: of the twenty-nine files recovered from the two sites, fifteen share one identical set of six sampled rainbow values, across both the Canadian and the national series. The rainbow arrives in these designs as a fixed component of the collection rather than as a choice made for each flag.
The thirty-one entries held here are not his complete output. Gay Journey and Gay Flags of the World carried further national, United States state, Canadian and general designs for which no artwork has been recovered, and the archive builds entries only for flags it can see. No biographical source about Gomes has been located beyond the two sites and the Texas post-office box, and no photograph of him has been found.
Attribution
- Organization
- Gay Journey
Attribution notes
This flag is one of the designs on the national page, and it carries the symbol Gomes placed before a flag name to mark a design as his own rather than one he catalogued. [1] His publication, that marking convention and his reuse terms are set out in the creator record below.
Origin
- Digital Origin
- Gay Journey (gayjourney.com)
- Origin Type
- creation place unknown; published online
- Physical Origin Status
- Not documented.
Represents Australia. The design was not made there: it was published through a McKinney, Texas post-office address and the place it was drawn is not documented. [1]
The flag represents Australia. Where it was made is not documented. The design was published through Gay Journey (gayjourney.com), run from American Dimensions, PO Box 573, McKinney, Texas, which is a mailing address for the publisher and not evidence of where Gomes lived or worked. No source located places Gomes in Australia or identifies him as a resident or community member there. [1]
Dates & Chronology
- Year Created
- Published online
- Published online by 2002; the collection ran to 2011. No physical use documented.
- Creation Bounds
- Four different things are recorded here and they are not the same date. The copyright range on Gay Journey begins in 2002, and the site's flag section is in the Internet Archive from 28 October 2002, which bounds the collection rather than this design. [1] Collection-level publication is documented from outside the sites twice: Francisco Santos described GayJourney.COM on Flags of the World on 14 May 2003 as carrying "lots of rainbows: from Argentina to Wales, EU, UNO, US states, Canadian provinces and general gay flags," and Richard Knipel wrote again on 14 June 2004. Neither report lists or dates an individual flag. [2] Direct documentation of this individual design has not been dated. No source dates the design itself, and no flag in the collection carries a date of its own. The year given is the earliest year the collection is documented in publication.
Lineage
- Direct predecessors
- Rainbow Pride Flag
- Sibling flags
- Alberta Gay Flag, Straight Ally Pride Flag, Anarcha-Queer Flag (rainbow variant), Argentina Gay Flag, Brazil Gay Flag, British Columbia Gay Flag
+ 44 more
Canadian Pride Flag, Chicago Pride Flag (Rainbow Stripes, Purple Stars), Chile Gay Flag, Dominican Republic Gay Flag, Egypt Gay Flag, European Union Gay Flag, France Gay Flag, Gay Pride Flag of Pakistan, Heteroflexible Pride Flag, Heterosexual / Straight Pride Flag, Homoflexible Pride Flag, India Gay Flag, Italy Gay Flag, Japan Gay Flag, Jewish Gay Pride Flag, Manitoba Gay Flag, Mexico Gay Flag, Netherlands Gay Flag, New Brunswick Gay Flag, Newfoundland Gay Flag, Northwest Territories Gay Flag, Nova Scotia Gay Flag, Nunavut Gay Flag, Ontario Gay Flag, Palestinian Gay Pride Flag, Panama Gay Flag, Philadelphia Pride Flag, Prince Edward Island Gay Flag, Quebec Gay Flag, Rainbow Flag with White Triangle (Sapporo), Rainbow Israel Flag, Rainbow Polish Flag (2014, Angela Getler), Russia Gay Flag, Saskatchewan Gay Flag, Social Justice Pride Flag, South African Gay Pride Flag, Switzerland Gay Flag, Tanzania Gay Flag, Texas Rainbow Flag, Turkish Gay Pride Flag, Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2005, Zoccole), Two-Spirit Pride Flag (2016 Tumblr documentation), Victory Over AIDS Flag (1980s, designer unknown), Yukon Territory Gay Flag - Lineage confidence
- high
Two visual sources, one of which the lineage graph can hold and one of which it cannot. The six-stripe Rainbow Pride Flag is a direct Pride-flag parent and is registered as one. The Flag of Australia is the second visual source, and it is recorded as a structured source-flag relationship in Design rather than as a graph node, because the graph accepts only Encycloflaggia entries and no Pride entry should be invented to create one. The relationship here is: source flag with elements selectively retained and further iconography added. Flags of the World describes the method this whole class of flag follows as "taking an existing flag and 'merging' it with the Rainbow Flag or various GLBT symbols to represent GLBT members of the group the existing flag represents." [2] The other Gomes flags are siblings by collection rather than by descent: one designer, one operation, four series published together under one set of terms. A shared designer is a collection relationship and not a substitute for parentage.
Lineage tree
Every record reachable from this one through documented parent and child relationships: 4 records across 4 generations.
- Ancestors -3
- Original Rainbow Flag (1978)
- Ancestors -2
- Seven-Stripe Rainbow Flag (1978)
- Ancestor
- Rainbow Pride Flag
- This record
- Australia Gay Flag
Colors & Symbolism
No published statement of meaning has been located.
| Colour | Hex |
|---|---|
| Red | #FF0000 |
| Orange | #FF6300 |
| Yellow | #FFFF00 |
| Green | #319C00 |
| Blue | #0000CE |
| Violet | #CE31FF |
This flag has no official digital palette. Color values shown are approximate.
The page gives the flags names and nothing more. [1]
Placement: the six stripes are visible chiefly across the hoist and the lower fly; the canton, the red fly field, the kangaroo and the silhouette carry their own colours. These are working values sampled from the surviving artwork at the centre of each band, not published specifications; the collection-level note on the recurring Gomes rainbow values is carried in the creator record rather than repeated on each flag.
Design
- Aspect Ratio
- 3:5 · apparent
- Ratio Notes
- Measured from the recovered artwork, 500 by 300 pixels. The page does not list this file's size, so the copy held here is identified by its filename and its position on the page. Published as apparent: measured from a served thumbnail, not from a specification.
- Orientation
- horizontal
- Center Symbol
- gold kangaroo in profile, facing the hoist
- Additional Symbols
- blue canton bearing five white Southern Cross stars, four eight-pointed and one five-pointed, blue seven-pointed star in the upper fly, yellow disc high in the fly, continuous with the yellow stripe, violet silhouette of the Australian mainland and Tasmania in the lower fly, red field filling the fly, continuous with the top red stripe
Not described in any located source. The recovered artwork is 500 by 300 pixels. The page does not state this file's size, so the copy held here is identified by its filename and its position on the page. A description drawn from the artwork itself has not yet been written. [1] Observed in the artwork: The Union Jack is absent. The canton is plain blue and holds the Southern Cross rather than the Union Flag. It is not documented whether this is deliberate or an artefact of the rendering. The four large Southern Cross stars have eight points, with spikes at the vertical, horizontal and four diagonal positions. The national flag's four large Southern Cross stars have seven points. The seven-pointed star sits in the upper fly and is blue on red, where the national flag places a seven-pointed white star on blue below the canton. The gold kangaroo, the yellow disc and the violet silhouette of Australia have no counterpart on the national flag. The image measures 500 by 300 pixels, a ratio of about 5:3, against the national flag's 1:2. The image limits what can be established: At 500 by 300 pixels the outlines are aliased, so the kangaroo's contour and the smallest Southern Cross star are read at the limit of resolution. Nothing in the image itself carries a signature, date or caption. The design is described from the recovered artwork, not from any source that describes it.
No proportion, construction sheet or specification has been located. [1]
Six equal horizontal stripes fill the field in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet from the top. A square blue canton covers the upper hoist, about three tenths of the length and half the height, obscuring the red, orange and yellow stripes there, and carries five white stars in the arrangement of the Southern Cross: four large eight-pointed stars and one smaller five-pointed star. The fly carries a solid red field continuous with the top stripe, bounded on its hoist side by a gold kangaroo in profile facing the hoist, whose tail sweeps up to a yellow disc set high in the fly; the disc runs into the yellow stripe without a break, and the underlying blue stripe shows through curled openings at the kangaroo's ear and chest. On the red field are a blue seven-pointed star in the upper fly and a violet silhouette of the Australian mainland with Tasmania in the lower fly. The Union Jack of the national flag does not appear anywhere in the image.
Source flag and visual comparison
- Source flag
- Flag of Australia
- Jurisdiction
- Australia
- Relationship
- source flag with elements selectively retained and further iconography added
- Elements retained
- the blue canton and the five stars of the Southern Cross, four large and one small; the seven-pointed Commonwealth Star, moved into the fly
- Elements altered
- the Union Jack, which the national flag carries in the canton, is absent; the field becomes six rainbow stripes; a gold kangaroo, a yellow disc and a violet silhouette of the mainland and Tasmania are added
The Australian national flag is a blue ensign with the Union Jack in the canton, the Commonwealth Star beneath it and the Southern Cross in the fly. This design keeps the Southern Cross and the seven-pointed star, drops the Union Jack, and adds national iconography that is not on the flag at all.
Usage & Adoption
- Current Status
- unknown
No physical use has been documented. [1]
Image Archive
Source Flag and Visual Comparison
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Footnotes & Citations
Sources and footnotes 3 sources
Designer page
- 1. National Gay Flags Of The World. Greg Gomes. Gay Journey / American Dimensions, McKinney, Texas. Accessed 2026-08-10 · Archived version
The designer's own page. Cited for the flag's publication, its marking as a Gomes design, and the reuse terms.
Databases
- 2. Variations of the Gay Pride Rainbow Flag (1). randy young (editor); reports by Richard Knipel and Francisco Santos. Flags of the World (2023-09-30). Accessed 2026-08-10
Cited for the two dated outside reports of the GayJourney collection, 14 May 2003 and 14 June 2004.
Image file page
- File:Flag of Australia.svg. Vector graphics by Ian Fieggen. Wikimedia Commons. Accessed 2026-08-11
The file-description page for the source-flag comparison image in this entry's gallery, read for its licence, authorship and restriction metadata.
Image Sources
- Rendering
- original artwork recovered
- Australia gay flag as published by Greg Gomes on the Gay Journey national page. · Credit: Design by Greg Gomes, Gay Journey · Gay Journey, National Gay Flags Of The WorldRights Gay Journey identified the marked designs as Gomes's property and asked that reuse be credited to him and linked back to gay_flags.htm. The credit and the link here are placed to those terms as published; the present rights and contact status have not been independently verified. [1]
- Flag of Australia (Australia), the source flag for this design. The Australian national flag is a blue ensign with the Union Jack in the canton, the Commonwealth Star beneath it and the Southern Cross in the fly. This design keeps the Southern Cross and the seven-pointed star, drops the Union Jack, and adds national iconography that is not on the flag at all. Relationship: source flag with elements selectively retained and further iconography added. Retained: the blue canton and the five stars of the Southern Cross, four large and one small; the seven-pointed Commonwealth Star, moved into the fly. Altered: the Union Jack, which the national flag carries in the canton, is absent; the field becomes six rainbow stripes; a gold kangaroo, a yellow disc and a violet silhouette of the mainland and Tasmania are added. · Credit: Vector graphics by Ian Fieggen · Wikimedia CommonsRights Public domain. Wikimedia Commons marks this file with an insignia restriction: it depicts a flag, coat of arms, seal or other official insignia whose use is restricted in many countries independently of copyright. Reproduced here as a comparison for the Gomes design, not as a representation of any government.