New Flag for Tasmania

The last Australian state flag to look at is the flag of Tasmania, probably best known to American audiences because of the Tasmanian Devil who chased Bugs Bunny and was just legs and arms sticking out of a head.  The actual animal does not spin like a tornado, can not eat horses in one bite, and also is not on the flag, though it should be:

Unfortunately, this island home of a number of really cool animals chose the red English (British?) lion as the symbol it wanted on the flag, along with the Union Jack seen in every other Australian state flag.

My first idea was a little lazy of me, as I thought I could get away with just putting a map on the flag, counting on the distinctive shape of the island to set it apart:

Pretend I used something other than MS Paint to create this flag, or that I used a higher resolution map to eliminate the blockiness, and this flag is only ok.  The island has a distinctive shape, resembling an animal's head maybe, or an arrowhead, but even with the two northern islands, it was just kind of boring.  I did some hunting through some other lesser known world flags and chose one which needed only a little color tweaking to make it Tasmania-appropriate:

This was originally the flag of Cojedes, a Venezuelan state in the north-east of that country.  The changes I made were making the bottom stripe white (it had been blue) to signify how Tasmania lay just north of Antarctica, the second stripe blue (it had been black) to show that only ocean separated Tasmania from the southern ice, and I flipped the sunburst from the left of the flag to the right, which is where Tasmania lies in relation to the Australian continent.  The orange and sun don't stand for anything specific, I just thought they looked good.

This may end my post on Australian flags, though if I can come up with a good idea, I'll probably do the Australian Capital Territory as well.

One last note, kudos to the interior divisions of the South American countries.  The provinces of Argentina, the states of Venezuela and Brazil, by and large have really great flags.  I foresee no need for a "Fix the Flags of Brazil" series of posts, because except for a few superfluous seals and coats-of-arms, they show great variety and simplicity.  Bravo.

New Flag for Queensland

Queensland's flag has a crown on it.  That factual statement is the nicest thing I can say about Queensland's flag:

Queensland is the second Australian state named after Queen Victoria, the other being Victoria (duh) and thus uses the same crown that we saw on Victoria's flag.  It's on top of a Maltese cross for some reason, but there are only six Australian states, you'd think they could at least use original clip art. 

As I stated in a previous post, I think it is a travesty that I haven't suggested any kangaroo-based designs yet, and because I only have Tasmania left and they have their own awesome animals, Queensland seems the place to do it:

The colors primarily represent the varied geography of the state, green for the tropical rainforests, yellow for the outback, and blue for the ocean (again, duh).  The yellow kangaroo on green is also a common symbol throughout Australia, they even have a boxing kangaroo flag often seen at sporting events, though I heard they got in trouble at the Vancouver Olympics for displaying it:

Kangaroo's are synonymous with this island continent/country, and deserve to show up on at least one of the state flags.