The 118-year-old NSW symbol getting a makeover for the modern era

When Britain’s King Edward VII granted the NSW state arms by royal warrant in 1906, he couldn’t have foreseen the challenges that would one day be posed by the PDF file.

As the NSW government sought to reproduce the official state symbol, which features a lion and kangaroo, on documents, buildings, signs and – increasingly – online, bureaucrats faced a thoroughly modern dilemma.

The NSW government has updated its coat of arms.

A technicality meant the 118-year-old coat of arms, which hadn’t been updated since the 1980s, could not be replicated in digital formats without the lines separating or the image getting blurry.

To tackle the problem, the Premier’s Department embarked on a contemporary makeover of the coat of arms, ordering a redesign and digitising the emblem’s files for the first time in the state’s history.

“This change helps us bring the state arms into the 21st century and ensure it is fit for purpose for current and future uses,” a Premier’s Department spokeswoman said.

The tweaked emblems will be ready for government agencies to roll out later this year.

Australian Heraldry Society secretary Stephen Szabo, who is also a heraldic consultant, said the symbol had been “rejigged” within the constraints of the so-called blazon, or heraldic formula.

“This is about making the image usable, it is a case of making the lines fairly clean,” Szabo said.

“The good thing is they’re still sticking to the formal description of it, they’re not going crazy.”

The crux of the problem was the century-old coat of arms, designed by publisher William Gullick, was not available in a format that enabled the image to infinitely adjust in size without losing resolution.

It meant the government could only use the full-colour emblem on some small applications, such as certificates, and often had to opt for a black outline – even though the coloured version is preferred.

The emblems – including a lion and kangaroo – featured on the coat of arms symbolise NSW’s links to Britain and Australian identity.

The former NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet had started researching the update in 2020. Together with the Department of Customer Service, which oversees branding, it outsourced the project in 2022 to Sydney-based design agency For the People – who enlisted UK illustrator Chris Mitchell – to update the emblem across a “suite of files optimised for different formats and uses”.

The result, the government said, was a “more intricate and refined set of state arms artworks in appropriate formats, which are responsive at different sizes and across various applications”.

Szabo said the rising popularity of online heraldic artwork by computer graphic artists, who often added details such as shading and shadows, opened new possibilities and had “revitalised heraldry”.

“Rather than just scanning an image and bunging it up there and hoping for the best, it’s about using whatever graphics functions are available to make it look good.

“And it should look good, it shouldn’t look like someone’s done a dodgy cut-and-paste.”

Szabo said the lion symbolised the state’s links to Britain, and the kangaroo represented Australian identity: “It’s telling us where we’re coming from and where we’re going.”

The stars reference the Southern Cross; the golden fleece and wheat sheaves represent the wool industry and the state’s agricultural wealth; and the rising sun symbolises hope for the future.

The motto contains the Latin inscription “Orta recens quam pura nites” which, in English, means “Newly risen, how brightly you shine”.

The NSW coat of arms only replaced the royal coat of arms, which features a lion and a unicorn, in state parliament in 2006. The NSW parliament had passed a law, which required the royal coat of arms to be replaced in most state buildings with the state arms, in 2004.

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