The NZ flag may be a contentious topic. But Justin Newcombe feels patriotic and makes his own.
I first became interested in the history of the New Zealand flag when working for Auckland Artist Stanley Palmer in the early 1990s. Stanley is a history buff and I arrived at his house one morning to find him dishing out instructions to two women on his kitchen floor. One was an expert in textile dye and the other was a seamstress. The project that morning was producing a New Zealand flag - but not the standard New Zealand flag or the black flag with silver fern. Stanley's flag was the Confederated Chiefs' flag - "... the one we all agreed on," he thundered. Not content with buying the flag from a shop or market and being as close to a Renaissance man as New Zealand has ever produced, Stanley was busy mixing and testing dye and selecting the exact cloth and thread a flag maker would have used 150 years ago.
Once I delved a little into the historical side of flags in New Zealand myself, I found we've been quite free and easy with our flag adoration. I found many local regional and borough flags which we have sadly abandoned. In many ways we seem to have reached a cultural bottleneck and this is reflected no more so than in the flag debate. All this to-ing and fro-ing can be very divisive but I'd like to take a leaf out of our forebears' book and make my own flag for this country. I want my flag to reflect the human and cultural history of New Zealand, its natural beauty and its physical position on the planet. So in my design the two tones of blue form a horizon line where the sea meets the sky, the cloud/koru shapes represent the three main islands which form New Zealand and the stars, naturally, depict our own Southern Cross constellation.
It might not be the flag you'd prefer to stand under on an important occasion but that doesn't mean our current flag reflects who we've become either.
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