Comments on: Vexing Vexillology

By: paul lawson

paul lawson — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:31:41 +0000

Graham, knocking can be left to Don Scott. The 1925 ‘Mayberries’ sweater (revived once last year) looked good. They won, too. This year’s version (by the marketing department?) did not. And you can probably start formulating excuses for the football department. They’ll soon need talking points to refute Scott. The scoreboard won’t. But where do the Hawks fit? Like the Shinboners and Scraggers they weren’t ‘there’ in the brief post-colonial dawn. They gain currency during Stanley Bruce’s neo-imperialism. Diligent research may find pictures of them taking to the field in ‘spats’.

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 14:44:58 +0000

Australian sporting teams started wearing green & gold in the early 20th Century (though the Australia rugby started out in a combination of light blue and maroon, for reasons obvious to aficionados…) However, Blue and Gold was the official state colours until Hawke changed them. And don’t you bloody knock the mighty Brown & Gold.

By: paul lawson

paul lawson — Wed, 03 Mar 2004 03:53:24 +0000

Thanks, Alan, for revealing we can thank the ‘Silver Bodgie’, not Ming, for mandating green and gold. It can also be revealed that sports persons were at greater risk than has hitherto been realised. At the outset of the 1983 Campaign, when the shirts and ties of the new Leader of the Opposition were being vetted for commercials, ABC ‘Free Time’, and the Opera House ‘launch’, Robert James Lee confessed that he was red-green colour blind. His perception of the hair colour of his new ‘minder’, Kerry O’Brien…brown. The stirring new red,white, and blue ALP logo…brown,white, and dark brown. Blanche’s lipstick? Brown. A can of VB? Brownish and brownish. Keating’s ‘power’ red ties? Brown. A very wide brown land indeed faced the new PM in his first term, and, self-evidently, it was girt by shades of darker brown. No wonder he chose brown and light brown as the national colours. Wasn’t the Hawthorn football jumper the most ‘colourful’ in the VFL? And those new brown and light brown Medicare cards looked wonderful. A visionary choice had to be made.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:20:22 +0000

As has been mentioned above, the azzurri take their colours from the royal house of Savoy, rather than the national flag of the time. Makes you wonder what a British team following the colours of the Royal Standard might look like...

By: jlw

jlw — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 16:06:01 +0000

Here’s a list of all the national team strip colors, courtesy the rec.sport.soccer archives. Can’t vouch for the accuracy of the info therein, but a quick scan reveals Ghana (all white), Japan (blue and white), and India (sky-blue/white/dark-blue) at odds with their flags.

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:26:07 +0000

In one-day internationals, the England cricket strip is usually blue, though I guess that’s because the usual English white isn’t available for one-day strips. Blue did win out over red, though. India wear blue too, IIRC, and it’s not a colour in their national flag, is it?

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 09:36:14 +0000

This is the wattle It is the emblem of our land You can stick it in a bottle Or you can hold it in your hand.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 04:13:12 +0000

Before the invention of chemical dyes, reds and blues were just about the only lightfast colors. I think the Dutch have the only non-red/white/blue flag from before O Chem, and even they called it Orange in theory, but used a red dye in practice. Green-and-gold are the local high school colors, but they have an excuse: that’s what the live oaks and grasses on the hills look like, for the 9 or 10 months of the year when the grass isn’t green but the trees still are. (Ireland we are not)

By: eszter

eszter — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 03:16:22 +0000

First, whose post are you calling trivial?;-) Second, Italy can’t use red, white and green because Hungary uses those colors.;) It makes more sense for Hungarians since they can put on a red shirt, white shorts and green socks and look exactly like the flag whereas Italians would have to have one side one color, the other side another color.:)

By: Errol

Errol — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 02:58:18 +0000

Countries having uniform colour different from their flags is hardly surprising, given that so many flags share colours – especially in the British Empire. History of the All Blacks name and uniform at http://www.rugbymuseum.co.nz/default.asp?level1=Rugby_Articles

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:53:47 +0000

Hawke gave us green-and-gold in 1984. Apart from anything else it’s a truly horrible colour combination. If we had a less contested flag, like Canada, and one that did not use the almost universal red-white-blue, we would probably use the flag colours.

By: paul lawson

paul lawson — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:45:36 +0000

The original,post-Fedederation, national colours were designated as blue and gold. (Probably still are.) Blue skies,sunshine, post-colonial, pre-WW1,optimism. No connect with the flag palette from the outset. Menzies is tagged with enshrining the green and gold for sports. Just one his crimes.

By: A German in Britain

A German in Britain — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 23:13:17 +0000

Germany’s traditional kit is a white shirt with black shorts. Later on they added the national flag colours black-red-gold as an application on the white shirt (most prominently starting with the World Cup 1990 in Italy, which Germany of course won, and which was the climax of national sentiment in this reunification year). Black-white goes back to the traditional Prussian colours black-white-red which were used for the national flag during the Reich (1871-1914), the Weimar Republic (1914-33) and, in a different setting, with red dominant, as the Nazi flag (1933-45). As the German Football Association (DFB) was founded in 1900, black-white was a natural choice and apparently survived ever since. (For the same reason Austria plays in black-white, too). Historically, Germany had always two national colours. Black-White-Red is the Prussian, great-German, conservative flag of choice, whereas Black-Red-Gold is the Southern, small-German, liberal flag of choice (and therefore the Weimar Republic’s flag was quite a disappointment for the Left). The traditional explanation for Germany’s green away kit is normally that green is the colour of the pitch. However, both fans and players always disliked the green away shirts (partly because of aesthetic reasons, but primarily because Germany seemed to loose more matches in these green away shirts). Due to popular demand and pressure from the players, Germany’s away kit is now simply the inverse home kit, ie the new away kit is a black shirt with white shorts. But Kieran’s story is certainly much more interesting… So who’s first to write a paper entitled “The Comparative Sociology of National Football Colours, 1900-2000”?

By: rea

rea — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:53:41 +0000

Well, the color orange USED to be in the Dutch flag, but they changed over to red, which was more visible, or more easily reproduced, or more politically neutral, or something . . . http://www.flags-by-swi.com/fotw/flags/nl-histo.html http://www.allyoucanread.com/flag.asp?id=123

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:33:14 +0000

I’ve heard that Germany’s Away Strip is green as a gesture of thanks to Ireland, believe it or not. The story goes that Ireland was the first country to agree to play Germany in a football international after the Second World War, when (West) Germany was gradually re-establishing its credentials as a civilized nation. Out of gratitude, the Germans adopted a green strip as their away gear.