It seems to be “trivia”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001435.html “day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001432.html here at CT, so I will chip in with a question that came to me when watching a report about the Australian Olympic trials. Australian athletes and sports teams compete in green and gold, even though neither of those colors is in their “national flag”:http://www.anbg.gov.au/oz/flag.html.[1] New Zealand does this as well — see, e.g., the “All Blacks”:http://www.nzrugby.co.nz/.
Now, when I started this post I was developing a clever theory to explain this that relied heavily on the fact that Australia and New Zealand are both post-colonial nations located in the Southern Hemisphere. But two European examples just occurred to me: the Italians compete in blue and the Dutch in Orange. Maybe I should just stick to my original question of where Australia got the green and gold scheme from. Are there any other examples of countries whose home sports kit doesn’t share anything with their national flag?
fn1. Here we pause to congratulate Australia on including two of the sillier animals known to man in their “Coat of Arms”:http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/images/ccoa_lge.jpg. Having gone that far, couldn’t they have found room for a platypus in there somewhere? Down the bottom, maybe?
{ 19 comments }
Iysam 03.01.04 at 9:40 pm
Well, I think they thought that that way it would be cooler. you know, there are a lot of countries with the traditional red, blue and white. (uk, states, etc)
John Quiggin 03.01.04 at 9:52 pm
The standard claim is that the colours represent the wattle.
I think the postcolonial analysis is correct even if it doesn’t explain Italy and the Netherlands.
The platypus has been taken as the state animal emblem for NSW, but IIRC, the state coat of arms is a pretty boring representation of industrial prosperity.
The animal emblem of Queensland is the sleepiest known mammal*, the koala
*factoid made up on the spot, but they do sleep a lot.
mike d 03.01.04 at 9:56 pm
I always thought the Dutch used Orange for the House of Orange, their royal family. Italy is even more interesting because blue is the color of the Savoia family, their former royal family.
And I suspect the All Blacks play in all blakc becuase it never goes out of style.
Eric Scharf 03.01.04 at 10:26 pm
Somehow, Peter Jackson didn’t find time to thank the All Blacks last night, let alone explain their colo(u)rs.
I’ve long been curious about the colors worn by the German national football (soccer) team; they typically wear white uniforms (with black, red, and gold trim), but occasionally their opponents are permitted to wear white kits, in which case the Germans go all dark green. I’ve noticed the Austrians doing this as well, and I wonder if anyone can tell me why. I’ve long suspected it’s related to the green uniforms of German police, but I have no evidence for that.
Kieran Healy 03.01.04 at 10:33 pm
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.
rea 03.01.04 at 10:53 pm
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
A German in Britain 03.01.04 at 11:13 pm
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”?
paul lawson 03.02.04 at 12:45 am
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.
Alan 03.02.04 at 1:53 am
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.
Errol 03.02.04 at 2:58 am
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
eszter 03.02.04 at 3:16 am
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.:)
Dave 03.02.04 at 4:13 am
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)
Alan 03.02.04 at 9:36 am
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.
Nick 03.02.04 at 2:26 pm
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?
jlw 03.02.04 at 4:06 pm
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.
nick 03.02.04 at 6:20 pm
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…
paul lawson 03.03.04 at 3:53 am
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.
Graham 03.03.04 at 2:44 pm
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.
paul lawson 03.04.04 at 1:31 am
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’.
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