Australian flag variation

I already mentioned Ausflag and their mission to persuade the powers that be that retaining the British Union flag in the Australian flag is a little out of date given that Australia has been an independent nation since 1986. They ran a competition for a replacement flag with results announced in 2000. I have added my version of Franck Gentil's competition winner to my SVG-based flag collection. This is it in PNG format:

(Flag)

If you are using a sufficiently old web browser, you should also be able to see the SVG version:

My version of the design differs from the version shown in the competition in that (a) I have retained the 2:1 width-to-height ratio, and (b) the stars are all the same size as in the existing flag, whereas Mr Gentil's version increases their sizes slightly.

Compared with the existing 1908 flag, the differences are as follows. Apart from the obvious omission of the British flag from the top left, I found that I needed to adjust the positions of the federation star and the Southern Cross to make the the flag look reasonably balanced. If you imagine the flag split in to one-third and two-thirds sections, the federation star is defined by a circle centred in the left third, and the Southern Cross has been moved to be centred in the right two-thirds.

1908 flag
Ausflag competition 2000 number 92

The division in to thirds pleases me because it is consistent with the 'Australian pale', a uniquely Australian vexillological style (vexilology means the study of flags, and per pale being the heraldry term for dividing the field in two vertically).

Edit (2004-07-19). I started this entry a few days ago but ended up debugging my home network settings rather than finishing it. So most of the above text was actually written today.