Australia Emoji

🇦🇺 the Australian flag emoji is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇦 and 🇺, Australia's country code AU, which phones and Macs draw together as the blue flag with the Union Jack, the large seven-pointed Commonwealth Star and the Southern Cross. Windows' own emoji font has no country flags, so on most Windows PCs the same emoji shows as the letters AU; it still copies and pastes correctly, and anyone on a phone sees the flag. Its near-twin 🇳🇿 New Zealand has red stars and no Commonwealth Star, the quickest way to tell the two apart at emoji size.

Australia's external territories have flags of their own: 🇨🇽 Christmas Island, 🇨🇨 the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and 🇳🇫 Norfolk Island. 🇭🇲, the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands in the Southern Ocean, flies the Australian flag, and most phones draw it exactly like 🇦🇺.

The coat of arms has a kangaroo and an emu, and only one of them has an emoji. 🦘 Kangaroo arrived in 2018 and is now the animal people send for Australia, with 🐨 koala, one of the original Japanese emoji, close behind. The national flower is the golden wattle, whose fluffy yellow flowers are usually sent as 🌼 blossom, above all on Wattle Day, 1 September. Green and gold have been the national colours since 1984, so 💚💛 is what fans paste for the Wallabies, the Matildas or any team in the national colours. ⭐ and 🌌 stand for the Southern Cross and the outback night sky, 🌏 is the globe that shows Australia, and 🙃 is the running joke about life Down Under.

Aboriginal flag emoji and Torres Strait Islander colours 🖤💛❤️

There is no Aboriginal flag emoji, and no Torres Strait Islander flag emoji either: flag emoji cover countries and territories with a two-letter code, plus a short list of others. People write both flags in hearts. The Aboriginal flag, designed by Luritja artist Harold Thomas and first flown in Adelaide in 1971, is black over red with a yellow circle: black for Aboriginal people, red for the earth and ochre, yellow for the sun. It is pasted as 🖤💛❤️. The Torres Strait Islander flag, designed by Bernard Namok in 1992, has green bands for the land, blue for the sea, black lines for the people and a white dhari, a headdress, with a star; it is written 💚💙🖤🤍. Both have been official flags of Australia since 1995.

These hearts appear in bios and email signatures next to an Acknowledgement of Country, and all through NAIDOC Week in July, which celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture. 🪃 boomerang, added in 2020, is the one emoji tied directly to First Nations culture; there is no didgeridoo. 🪨 rock and 🏜️ desert stand in for Uluṟu and the Red Centre. The traditional owners of Uluṟu, the Aṉangu, long asked visitors not to climb it, and the climb closed for good in October 2019.

Australia Day, Anzac Day and a summer Christmas: holiday emoji

Australia Day, 26 January, marks the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and is the national public holiday: 🇦🇺🎉 with a barbie, the beach and fireworks. It is also a contested date. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their supporters call it Invasion Day or Survival Day, and for them the emoji of the day is 🖤💛❤️.

Anzac Day, 25 April, remembers the landing at Gallipoli in 1915 and everyone who has served since. It begins with dawn services, 🌅, and its emoji are 🎖️ medals, 🫡 a salute and a red flower: there is no poppy emoji, so 🌺 stands in. 🌿 is the sprig of rosemary people pin on, a herb that grows wild on the Gallipoli peninsula. 🇦🇺🇳🇿 side by side spell out ANZAC itself, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the words under the posts are usually Lest we forget. In the afternoon pubs play two-up, a game of tossing coins 🪙, which is legal on this one day in most states.

Christmas falls in summer: 🎄🎅 next to ☀️🏖️, prawns 🦐 for lunch, mangoes 🥭 and cherries 🍒 for dessert, and backyard cricket after. Boxing Day brings the cricket Test at the MCG 🏏 and the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race ⛵, and New Year's Eve is the fireworks over Sydney Harbour, 🌉🎆🎇. On the first Tuesday of November the Melbourne Cup, the race that stops a nation, is 🏇 with 👒 for the fashions on the field. Voting is compulsory, and local groups often serve democracy sausages at polling places on election day, 🗳️🌭.

Aussie animals, beach and barbie emoji

Beyond 🦘 and 🐨, the Australian bush in emoji is 🦜 cockatoos, galahs and rainbow lorikeets, 🦎 goannas and bearded dragons, and the creatures behind the joke that everything here wants to kill you: 🕷️ redbacks and huntsmen, 🐍 brown snakes, 🐊 the saltwater crocodiles of the Top End, 🦈 sharks and 🪼 stingers. 🐧 is for the little penguins that waddle ashore on Phillip Island every evening, 🐋 the humpbacks that migrate along the east coast, and 🐠🐢🪸 the Great Barrier Reef, best seen with 🤿. 🐑 stands for the merino flocks that make Australia the world's biggest wool producer, 🐪 the wild camels of the outback, and 🪰 the bush flies behind the Aussie salute, the wave that brushes them off your face. There is no emoji yet for the emu, platypus, wombat or kookaburra.

Summer is 🏖️🌊🏄 and 🛟 for the surf lifesavers who patrol between the red-and-yellow flags. Australians call flip-flops thongs, and Unicode agrees: 🩴 is officially named thong sandal. 🩲 is budgie smugglers, the tight swim briefs; 🧴 was part of Slip, Slop, Slap from 1981, while 🕶️ sunglasses were added later as Slide. Heat is measured in Celsius, 🥵 45°C, and road trips go by 🛻, the ute, which Ford Australia first built in 1934, out past 🏕️ campsites into 🤠 Akubra-hat country.

The barbie is 🔥 with 🌭 snags, 🥩 steak, 🍖 lamb chops and 🦐 prawns: Paul Hogan's tourism ads of the 1980s promised Americans a shrimp on the barbie, but Australians say prawn. A snag in a slice of bread is the sausage sizzle, a national institution. 🥧 is the meat pie at the footy, 🍞 Vegemite on toast, 🍰 a lamington or a pavlova (New Zealand claims that one too), 🍪 Anzac biscuits, 🍫 Tim Tams and 🥑 smashed avo, the café breakfast. ☕ is the flat white, 🍺🍻 a schooner and a shout, a round bought for the group, and 🍷 the wine of the Barossa, the Hunter and Margaret River.

Footy, cricket and cities: sport and places in emoji

There is no Aussie rules ball emoji, so 🏉 does the job for all the oval-ball codes: the AFL, whose game was born in Melbourne in the 1850s, rugby league's NRL and State of Origin, Queensland against New South Wales, and the Wallabies in rugby union. ⚽ is the Matildas and the Socceroos. Summer belongs to 🏏 cricket, the Ashes against England above all, and January to 🎾 the Australian Open in Melbourne. 🏊 the swimmers, the Dolphins, are a fixture of every Olympics, 🏎️ the Australian Grand Prix races around Albert Park lake, and 🏟️ is the MCG, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which holds about 100,000 people.

Cities have their own shorthand: 🌉 the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 🏙️ any CBD skyline, 🚊 Melbourne's trams, the largest tram network in the world. The Sydney Opera House has no emoji of its own, so people write it out or post 🌉 next to its name.

Australian dollar $ and c for cents; letters of Uluṟu: ṉ ḻ ṟ ṯ

The Australian dollar is written $ before the number with no space, $20 or $4.95, and A$ or AUD when it must be told apart from other dollars. Write cents with c after the number, though the 1c and 2c coins were withdrawn in 1992 and cash totals are rounded to the nearest 5c. Australian keyboards use the US layout, so $ is Shift + 4, and the degree sign in 35°C is Alt + 0176 or Option + Shift + 8. Australia issued the world's first polymer banknote, a $10 note, in 1988, and its notes are still plastic, so 💵, a green paper note, is only an approximation; 💲 and 🪙 cover prices and coins. More currencies are in the Money collection.

English is the main language: CLDR estimates about 26 million speakers, and Australian English needs nothing beyond A–Z, spelling colour and centre the British way and borrowing words such as café. CLDR lists about 509,000 for Italian and 562,000 for Chinese (Traditional); see our Italian and Traditional Chinese collections for their writing systems. The special letters you meet on Australian signs and maps come from Aboriginal languages. Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, spoken by the Aṉangu of Central Australia, underline their retroflex consonants, sounds made with the tip of the tongue curled back: ṉ ḻ ṟ ṯ. That is why the official name is Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park.

Each of these is a single Unicode character: ṉ U+1E49, ḻ U+1E3B, ṟ U+1E5F and ṯ U+1E6F, with capitals Ṉ Ḻ Ṟ Ṯ. Most keyboards have no key for them. In Microsoft Word, type the code, for example 1e5f, and press Alt + X; on a Mac, search the Character Viewer (Control + Command + Space) for “line below”; in HTML write ṟ for ṟ, ṉ for ṉ, ḻ for ḻ and ṯ for ṯ. Or copy them from the grid. Some texts build the same letters from a plain letter and a combining underline; they look alike, and the single characters here are the ones search engines match most reliably.