VICTORIA, FLAG OF

Australian flag consisting of a blue field (background) bearing the Union Jack in the canton and a crown and Southern Cross constellation at the fly end. The flag may be described as a defaced Blue Ensign. Perhaps as early as 1823 the Southern Cross constellation was incorporated in a flag representing Australia. The 1851 flag of the Australasian Anti-Transportation League, which opposed Britain's policy of exporting criminals to Australia, bore five gold multipointed stars on a blue flag that also had a white border and the Union Jack in the canton. In 1854 miners at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria, protested government labour policies by hoisting a blue flag with a white cross and five white eight-pointed stars. That well-known flag is still used by many groups in Australia today. On February 4, 1870, the colony of Victoria adopted an official badge for use on the British Blue Ensign. That first Victoria badge had five white stars with varying numbers of points, arranged to correspond to the Southern Cross. Privately owned vessels used the same badge on the British Red Ensign until 1875, when Britain forbade that practice. On April 6, 1877, the badge was changed to a white disk with the imperial crown above a blue shield bearing the Southern Cross constellation. On November 12, 1877, the present flag was proclaimed by the governor, Sir George Ferguson-Bowen, and the new design appeared in the Government Gazette on November 30. A change in the design of the crown was authorized on September 19, 1901, following the death of Queen Victoria, but the modification was not performed until January 6, 1904. Whitney Smith