Are you a descendant of one of those designers who won the National Flag competition in 1901?

DESCENDANTS OF FLAG'S DESIGNERS SOUGHT FOR ITS 104" 'BIRTHDAY'

With our flag's 104th birthday approaching on 3 September, the Australian National Flag Association is trying to locate all the living relatives of the original designers of our flag the five people who jointly won the official flag design competition run in 1901. Queensland President Allan Pidgeon said: "We'd like to honour the memory of those who won the World's first ever open public competition to design a national, flag". "Australia's flag is unique in that it is the only one to fly over an entire continent, and also in the way it was chosen following federation in 1901". There was a huge response to the competition announced by the new Commonwealth Government - the number of entries was equivalent to about 1 % of the Australian population at the time. Arranging the 32,823 entries for display at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne took eight weeks, and it took the judges appointed by the government six days to inspect all the entries and choose the winning design. Another unique aspect of our flag's selection is that the competition was partly sponsored by a tobacco company - the prize pool of £200 was made up of £75 each from the Commonwealth Government and a journal called the 'Review of Reviews for Australasia', supplemented by a contribution of £5O from the Havelock Tobacco Company! (£200 was a considerable sum of money in 1901 some authorities have suggested that it was equivalent to four years' wages for an average worker.) To ensure that there could be no suggestion of favouritism, the entries were anonymous and were identified only by a code. The judges settled on five designs that were almost identical; so each of the five winners received £40 when their names were revealed on 3 September 1901. On that day the Countess of Hopetoun (wife of our first Governor-General) joined then-Prime Minister Edmund Barton at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. The scene was described by the Age Newspaper: "As Lady Hopetoun entered, a huge Blue Ensign with the prize design of the Southern Cross and a six-pointed star thereon was run up to the top of 'the flagstaff' on the dome and breaking, streamed out on the heavy south-westerly breeze - a brave and inspiring picture".

The winners were:

• Annie Dorrington from Perth (who became quite a well-known artist);
  
• Ivor Evans from Melbourne (a 14 year-old schoolboy whose father owned a flag-making business);
  
• Leslie John Hawkins from Leichhardt in NSW (an 18 year-old, apprenticed to an optician);
  
• Egbert John Nuttall from Prahran in Victoria (a 35 year-old architect); and
  
• William Stevens (First Officer in the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand).
  

Anyone who can identify descendants of our flag's designers is invited to send details to qld@australianflag.org.au