According to military historian JOHN BLAXLAND, Australia's national flag is outdated. In part one of this two-part series he looks at the history of a symbol that has seen its day.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has floated the idea of replacing his nation's imperial blue ensign with a more distinctive national flag.

Scotland, meanwhile, is considering secession from the union in Britain and flag designers are having a field day.

Australia, likewise, needs to get serious about selecting a new, more inclusive flag for a modern, independent, multicultural nation.

It is time for Australians to reflect on their own national flag; on how it came to be, on what it represents and does not represent, and to consider if a design could emerge with which all Australians can identify and which could help the nation emerge more fully from Britain's symbolic shadow.

Pledges to our Indigenous population and engagement with Asia will mean nothing without a change to our flag.

Australia had a flag competition late last century but it petered out due to the lack of a sufficiently inspiring design to replace the current colourful, if anachronistic, national flag.

Even Australia's closest Commonwealth facsimile, Canada, dropped the Union Jack from the dominant top left quadrant of its flag, in 1965. Canada chose its own design featuring the red maple leaf, with each point representing a province (state equivalents). It introduced the flag while remaining a federal bicameral constitutional monarchy with the Queen as the head of state. The introduction was controversial, particularly in French-speaking parts of Canada. In hindsight, however, few now conceive of Canada having any other flag.

Changing Australia's flag to remove the Union Jack is not intrinsically linked to republicanism. The Canadians did not see the need to link the two. Neither should we. While many would agree it is time to move on from the vestiges of empire, they are separate issues. Like Canada, we should press through the controversy and agree on a new, more meaningful, inclusive and evocative national flag for all Australians.

In doing so, understanding who we were and who we are today is vitally important. So then, who were we when the current flag was chosen?

Australians mostly were ''old country'' migrants or descendants, living in a new federation of former colonies that were forged largely by the lash and the legacies of British class and justice.

Now, more than two centuries after the first British colonists arrived, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is preparing to acknowledge in our constitution the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples -- a profoundly important step for the first Australians, who have been treated appallingly in too many ways since 1788.

The worst colonial frontier violence against indigenous people happened under the Union Jack, of course, flown by colonial military units and police forces. That is a good enough reason alone, some would argue, to remove it from our own national flag, the blue ensign, with its Southern Cross and Federation star.

To be fair though, Australia's current flag is full of symbolism. The Southern Cross and the Federation star in particular have become identified with Australia. But the symbolism is heavily reliant on and subordinate to Britain's Union Jack in the top left corner. As a sixth-generation Australian of British descent, I appreciate the symbolism.

Removing the Union Jack entirely would result in many detractors, so it has to feature, at least in part. Scores are emotionally invested in the current flag and opposition is too strong to see it replaced by bland offerings.

Naysayers argue - almost viscerally - that we are too attached to the current flag emotionally and through our wartime experiences, to ever change it. But it is important to acknowledge that ''our flag'' was, for most of Australia's war dead, the Red Ensign or the British flag - the Union Jack.

Few realise that the overwhelming majority of Australia's 102,000 war dead fought and died for the British Empire under Britain's Union Jack as their national flag. Perhaps only 1000 of Australia's war dead (excluding frontier conflict victims) died under our current flag.

While the Blue Ensign became the Australian government flag in 1901, the Australian national flag was, until 1954, the British Union Jack.

It was not until the Menzies government passed the Flag Act in 1954 that the Blue Ensign became the national flag. Before that, Australians grew up more familiar with the Red Ensign -- that is, the Australian flag with the Union Jack along with the Federation and Southern Cross stars set against a red rather than a blue backdrop. This was the civil ensign and was recognised as the unofficial Australian flag.

So unfamiliar was the blue ensign that it was even misrepresented on the cover of a booklet commemorating Gallipoli in 1915, the Southern Cross stars given only six of their seven points.

The initial red and blue ensigns were selected in 1901 and the original design retained the Victorian configuration (with a five-, six-, seven-, eight- and nine-pointed star in its Southern Cross) with a six-pointed star representing the six original states of the Commonwealth placed directly below the Union Jack.

It was not until 1909 that the current seven-pointed configuration was adopted with the seventh point representing Commonwealth territories. Even then, the red and blue ensigns were hardly distinguishable from the flags of the other former colonies retained as state flags and the flag of New Zealand.

At the time that was a reasonable interpretation of the state of affairs; Australia was self-governing but it was still legally tied to the British Empire. It was not until after the Statute of Westminster that Australia gained a fuller independence. The statute was enacted by Britain on December 31, 1931 but not adopted by Australia's Parliament until October 1942. This occurred only after the British Empire was decisively discredited following the Japanese capture of Singapore in February 1942.

As American comedian Jerry Seinfeld once said, the Australian flag is the British flag on a starry night. The dominant top left quadrant belongs to the flag of another nation, making Australia symbolically subordinate to Britain. This is an anachronism.

That anachronism has been building in the years since World War II as Australia's identity increasingly separated from Britain. The Australian Citizenship Act of 1948 was a significant milestone. Before this, all Australians were simply ''British subjects''. Thereafter they remained British subjects and Australian citizens until Britain spurned its citizenship ties with Australia and other parts of its former empire at the tail end of the 1960s.

No longer would Australia continue to slavishly follow British models.

Post-war migration from war-torn Europe helped make the country more distinctly different from Britain, with large waves of Italian, Greek and other migrants. Afterwards, migrants would come from elsewhere, notably Asia and Latin America, to make the Australian community even more unique and distinct.

The Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal People) Act of 1967 went a long way towards recognising indigenous Australians. The abandonment of ''terra nullius'' three decades later, following the High Court's verdict over Mabo, would be the trigger for a further re-evaluation of Australian identity.

In the meantime, Britain's accession to the European Community in 1973 was a further cut to the apron strings as Britain turned to favour trade with its European neighbours at the expense of its imperial offshoots in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Britain's virtual abandonment of Australia and New Zealand took place while Gough Whitlam was Australia's prime minister.

Whitlam recognised the need to divest Australia of anachronistic symbols of subordination.

The Royal Mail became Australia Post. Imperial honours were replaced by an Australian honours system, albeit still with royal patronage. And Britain's Privy Council was excised from the Australian legal system as the highest court of appeal. Even God Save the Queen was replaced as the national anthem by Advance Australia Fair.

Yet still the most prominent symbol of subordination to Britain, the Union Jack in the corner of the flag, remained. Australia retained the blue ensign as the nation's flag, even though on so many levels the anachronism of the flag's arrangement led to a discordance with Australia's increasingly independent, self-confident and multicultural identity.

That discordance was most visibly evident during the Cronulla riots, when Anglo-Celtic Australian youth wore the blue ensign as a mark of distinction from the migrant groups that had so upset them. Tattoos aplenty were to be found as well, yet tattoos of the full union jack were a rare sight. Even for those wanting to drape themselves under the blue ensign, the union jack did not evoke the attachment of other distinctly Australian symbols such as the southern cross in its uniquely Australian seven-pointed-star configuration.

Australia's current flag came to be seen as a symbol of division and disunity associated with reaction and fringe politics. Today many are uncomfortable flying it and grasp at a range of informal alternatives such as the boxing kangaroo.

Dr John Blaxland is a sixth-generation Australian of British descent who happened to be born in Chile, speaks Spanish and Thai, and is married to a Canadian. He served in the Australian army for 28 years before taking up his appointment as a historian at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.

He is the author of The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 

Join the discussion on Australia's future flag at www.facebook.com/ReconciliationFlagForAustralia

This is an edited extract of a longer essay first published by The Canberra Times. Part two can be read here.