Australia has an unfair advantage when it comes to good-looking plants and potential floral emblems. As botanist and naturalist Joseph Banks found when he disembarked with James Cook in 1770, the country’s spectacular flora is remarkable. The arrival of Australian plants in Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century created a sensation among artists and scientists.

Even so, for a century after European settlement, there was a notable lack of agreement within Australia on the qualities of this flora. There is abundant evidence that visitors and those who settled in Australia did not see eye to eye on the beauty of its plants and animals. While Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote in The Wind’s Message of ‘a scent of eucalyptus trees in honey-laden bloom’, in Poems, Adam Lindsay Gordon spoke of lands ‘where bright blossoms are scentless’. It is difficult to think that Gordon could have had wattles, with their strong polleny smells, in mind, but as Edwin Ride pointed out, ‘To be fair to Gordon, he had continued in the same poem with the lines, “In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles”’.

Today the message is less mixed. The golden blossoms of wattle have inspired Australia’s choice of green and gold as colours for national sporting teams. Wattle featured with the kangaroo and emu on the coloured illustration of the Commonwealth coat of arms gazetted in January 1913 (though it is not in the formal description). It forms part of the design on Order of Australia medals.

National or Not

The idea of using flowers as symbols of national identity is an old one. Many countries have a national floral emblem (though the term ‘floral emblem’ is not well known except in Australia and Canada) and some, including Australia, have state or other subnational emblems. Canada has the maple leaf flag. New Zealand’s silver fern, Cyathea dealbata, is widely seen as a national emblem, but is not formally gazetted as one.

America has state floral emblems but no national one. In Floral Emblems of Australia, Anne Boden notes that it would be hard to find one plant that adequately represented all parts of a country as large and diverse in its native plants as the USA. By contrast, some of Australia’s most typical plants, the wattles and eucalypts, are found throughout the continent—as historian Libby Robin puts it, they are ‘geographically inclusive’.

This widespread occurrence means, at least according to some rhetoric, that the emblem of the golden wattle serves as a symbol of Australian unity. Other plants—the waratah or Sturt’s desert pea, for example— are boldly coloured and outstandingly attractive, but their more localised distribution made them prime candidates for state emblems. The waratah was a contender for a national emblem, but occurs only in south-eastern Australia and is most well known in New South Wales, a handicap that proved fatal.

Origins of the Emblem

One of the earliest documented symbolic uses of wattle was in Tasmania in 1838, 50 years after European settlement. The True Colonist, Van Diemen’s Land Political Despatch, and Agricultural and Commercial Advertiser of 7 December 1838 carried a story on floral buttonholes worn during celebrations on 1 December, referring somewhat sarcastically to surveyor George Frankland in its report.

There seemed to be a general determination to adhere to Mr Frankland’s national emblem, and in spite of the silver wattle refusing to put forth its blossoms out of season to meet the views of that exquisite naturalist, the defect was ingeniously supplied by uniting the blossom of the black wattle stripped of its foliage to a sprig of what is generally termed silver wattle (acacia lanceolata)

Perhaps the most interesting fact reported by the newspaper was that some of the people who were celebrating wore leaves of English oak with the wattle, and that others wore oak leaves alone. Buttonholes provided a convenient and attractive shorthand way of declaring national allegiance.

Why did Australia choose the wattle as its emblem? The Australian Natives’ Association played a major role in this, says historian Libby Robin. ‘Impressed by Canada’s recent successful promotion of the maple leaf, the ANA campaigned to make the wattle a flower for the federating nation of Australia’.

The association was directly involved in the Wattle Blossom League, which began in South Australia specifically for ‘Australian-born women and the wives (whether Australian-born or not) of members of the Australian Natives’ Association’. The league’s aims were explicitly those of nurturing patriotism, as its inaugural meeting in May 1890 declared:

To promote a national patriotic sentiment amongst the women of Australia, to interest women in the work of the Australian Natives’ Association, and to encourage in the household among a rising generation a spirit of Australian patriotism

Naturalist Archibald Campbell, co-editor of The Emu and author of the influential Nests and Eggs of Australian Birds, was a founding member of the Victorian Wattle Club (later League) in 1899. Campbell called for a national wattle day in 1909, and was involved in the establishment of a national organisation, the Australian Wattle Day League, in 1911. The first celebrations of Wattle Day occurred in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia in 1910 and in Western Australia and Queensland in 1912.

In these early days of Federation, arbor days, along with bird and wattle days, became popular in Australian schools. The rise of nationalism that began with Federation, and continued into the First World War, reinforced sentiment for home and country through the use of wattle and waratah images.

Both plants symbolised home and a longing for it, a connection visible in the many wattle-themed songs of the time. ‘There are lilies white and roses red’, went the song Golden Wattle—composed in the first decade after Federation by the splendidly named Adelaide Primrose—‘but I love my wattle so’.

Dreams of Aussie evokes a young man’s fancy:

There stands a lad true and loving

Steering the ship back home

Dreaming of someone he lov’d, oh so true,

Awaiting him over the foam.

He’s always

Dreaming of sunny Australia

Dreaming of someone sweet.

Dreaming of Wattle and Waratahs

And the girl he longs to meet.

In another piece of music from the time, the sentiments of Joe Slater’s Wattle Day march song and twostep echo those of the earlier Tasmanians who had combined the symbols of old country and new with their floral sprigs of oak and wattle almost a century beforehand. ‘Let us celebrate our Wattle Day’, Slater’s song went. ‘With the Rose, Thistle and the Shamrock green, may our Golden blossom forever be seen ... Oh carry me back to sunny Australia, and dear old Wattle Day.’

A Bright Image in Dark Days

During the First World War, wattle proved to be the useful patriotic symbol that the founders of the South Australian Wattle Blossom League had hoped for. Badges with mottos like ‘Our own for our own’, showing a spray of wattle, were sold to raise funds and to demonstrate publicly the wearer’s support for Australia’s war involvement, writes historian Kerrie Handasyde.

In the dark days of the Great War of 1914–18, the golden wattle was a patriotic symbol of nation. Images of Acacia pycnantha appeared on all kinds of ephemera—from badges to cards—which were sold to raise funds for the war effort.

The move for a coordinated national wattle day date, which had petered out during the mid-twentieth century, was revived with calls from Australian Plants Society member Maria Hitchcock and others in the years leading up to the bicentenary celebration of European settlement in 1988. Twenty million years of evolution in Australia conferred a kind of floral innocence upon the wattle that was not shared by the events of 26 January 1788—events that 230 years later are celebrated by some and mourned by others.

In 1992, the date of 1 September, the first of day of spring, became National Wattle Day. In announcing this, Governor-General William Hayden declared that it would be ‘an opportunity for all Australians to celebrate our floral heritage, particularly through the planting of an Acacia species suitable for the area in which they live’.

Bernadette Hince is an honorary lecturer in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences. She was a Harold White Fellow at the Library in 2006.