Being friends of the band, some of us used to go to hear Tootieville at inner-city hotels. They were an under-bubbling alternative band that brought out one record around the time of the Bicentennial. Today about the one thing I remember about Tootieville is the chorus to a song that went 'the only flag is your skin'.
You had to be there. It was hard to say what this line meant, whether a spoof on nationalism, some kind of erotic slogan, or just pretentious nonsense.
The proliferation since that time of tattooing as public expression brings the line back to my mind. When I see an attractive person covered in random images, my initial dismay is followed by the awareness we are seeing the insistent flag-waving of someone's inner frontiers.
But 'the only flag is your skin' tended to trigger a more general question: What is a flag? This was sometimes followed by the intermittently fluttering question: What is the meaning of the Australian flag?
There are national flags that make perfect sense. The tricolours of Europe express democratic republicanism. Old Glory is an emphatic display of American certainty, even if its cult inside the US is worrisome. Whenever I notice the flag of India I see the wheel of peace and Mahatma Gandhi. The Japanese flag hits you like a Zen koan.
But the same cannot be said of the Australian flag.
The problems begin with the fact that a quarter of it is taken up by another nation's flag. The presence of the Union Jack is a symbol of the slow separation of the Australian nation from its imperial connections. Satirists who replace the Union Jack with the 50 stars of the Union touch on our uncomfortable role as the best friend of superpowers past and present. Indeed, separation anxiety has come to be a meaning associated with the flag.
When Gough Whitlam helped raise the flag as a political issue he said the new one ought to have the Southern Cross. Whether this was Whitlam's preference, or he just wanted to spur discussion, is not clear.
Perhaps he harboured an historical affection for the Eureka Flag, with its dark blue field, bold cross and stars. Political affinities were there with the stockade on the Ballarat gold fields — an Australia independent of the Crown, an Australia able to assert its own rights.
But this was also a problem. Because the debate originated in the progressive side of politics it became partisan, so our leaders, parties, and grassroots have not been able to create impetus. Conservatives dug their heels in, or turned redneck. The advocates for change got bogged down in competitions, conferences and committees.
The debate over a new flag became associated with Paul Keating's proposal for a republic, but there is no reason why these two issues should be conflated. Keating's determined style was like a red rag to a bull and the bulls have never forgiven him, seeing anything that even hints at republicanism as a betrayal of the nation.
Most Commonwealth countries do not include the Union Jack on their flag and Australia will wake up sooner rather than later to the shift in our national allegiances that was already happening when Robert Menzies did but see her passing by. Eliding the Union Jack at some time in the future will not be a travesty but a transformation, not a rejection of our heritage but an acceptance of transition. A new flag would tell other nations what they know already, that Australia exists without reliance on London.
One of the stunning visuals at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the appearance in Moscow streets of hundreds of white, blue and red Russian flags. These flags had not been hastily stitched together overnight like the Eureka Flag of 1854. The Russian flag, splendid in its simplicity, was well-known to the Russians.
I am hardly suggesting that revolution will break out in Canberra. But the readiness of Australians to design a new flag that is agreed to and honoured ought to be on the agenda of any forward-looking party. Either that, or a day will arise when a design will be foisted on us that no one likes and which has no distinctive meaning. One only has to listen to the national anthem to know how Australians are capable of embracing second best.
Revisiting entries to the pre-John Howard flag competitions is an inspiring exercise. Vexillologists, artists, thinkers and dreamers contributed images that show an engagement with the island continent that is inspiriting, and a maturity that has outgrown the adolescent clowning of the Boxing Kangaroo. These are flags that take in the scale of the country, the variety of its nature, and the range of its colours.
Whitlam would be pleased with the number of entries that do justice to the Southern Cross, still the most popular image for a new flag. A favourite of mine is by the Austrian-Aotearoan artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, which is longer than the conventional rectangle, more like a banner, with a sun that could be the bend of the desert horizon, or Uluru, above a seven-pointed star suspended in the blue of ocean, or space itself.
During one round of the flag debate the cartoonist Michael Leunig had his own lateral proposal on what constituted an Australian flag. His corrugated iron flag has become a celebrated emblem for those who mistrust nationalism and its habit of using symbols like flags for selfish and narrow patriotic ends. His wavy metal standard even questions what a flag should be made from.
But more poignant than Leunig's reasons for a corrugated flag, in my view, is the fact that the flag is blank. It is telling us to get over tired arguments about the Union Jack and make a fresh attempt at self-definition.
Australian flag design should be a national preoccupation, a meditation on the larger reality of a country bigger and better than politics. It should be informed by stewardship of the land: we don't own it, but we live everyday with its transformative power. Simply to ask yourself what kind of flag you would design can be the start of a journey into your own understanding of place, past, present and future.
Philip Harvey is Eureka Street's poetry editor and head of the Carmelite Library of Spirituality in Middle Park, Victoria.