The Australian Aboriginal flag was originally esigned as a protest flag for the land rights movement of Indigenous Australians but has since become a symbol of the Aboriginal people of Australia. The flag is a yellow circle on a horizontally divided field of black and red and was designed in 1971 by Harold Thomas, an Aboriginal artist descended from the Luritja of Central Australia. On 14 July 1995, both the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag were officially proclaimed by the Australian government as "Flags of Australia" under Section 5 of the Flags Act 1953.