Qantas Brand Guidelines: The Flying Kangaroo

Qantas’s most famous symbol began on Australian currency.

Australia’s national airline wears a national animal, and the story starts with money. The kangaroo was first applied to a Qantas aircraft around 1944, adapted from the kangaroo on the Australian one-penny coin. It was a neat piece of instant symbolism: nothing says “Australia” faster than a kangaroo, and lifting it from the nation’s own currency gave the mark immediate legitimacy. From there the “Flying Kangaroo” became one of the most recognised airline symbols in the world — shorthand not just for an airline but for Australia itself. Our homage keeps the red tail-fin and a sense of flight, without the kangaroo.

The true ‘Flying Kangaroo’ is a 1947 design by Gert Sellheim.

The winged kangaroo — the actual “Flying Kangaroo” — came a little later, in 1947, designed by the artist Gert Sellheim, who literally gave the coin’s kangaroo a pair of wings so it could take to the air. It’s a small but important distinction often blurred: 1944 gave Qantas a kangaroo; 1947 gave it a flying one. Sellheim’s winged roo set the template for everything that followed — a leaping national animal, mid-flight, on the tail of the plane. That fusion of “Australia” and “flight” in a single figure is why the mark has endured through every subsequent redesign: the core idea was right from the start.

The kangaroo has been redrawn for each new era of jet.

The Flying Kangaroo has evolved with the fleet. In 1984, designer Tony Lunn gave it a major overhaul — famously dropping the wings and setting a more streamlined kangaroo within a red tail-fin triangle, a cleaner and more modern mark. In 2007, Hans Hulsbosch refreshed it again for the arrival of the Airbus A380, making the roo more dynamic and three-dimensional as it stretched across the tail. Each redesign kept the essential idea — a red tail, a leaping kangaroo — while modernising the execution for a new generation of aircraft. It’s a textbook example of evolving a beloved symbol rather than replacing it: change enough to feel current, never enough to lose recognition.

The Qantas roo carries a whole country, not just an airline.

What makes the Flying Kangaroo special is that it functions as a national symbol, not merely a corporate logo. For a country that sits a long way from most of the world, the airline has always been a point of pride and connection — the red tail is a little piece of home glimpsed at a foreign airport, a reassurance of a safe route back. That emotional weight is enormous, and it’s why the kangaroo has been treated with such care across the decades.

It also raises the stakes for every redesign. When your logo doubles as a stand-in for the nation, you can’t be cavalier with it — which is exactly why Qantas has consistently chosen evolution over reinvention, tweaking the same red-tail-and-kangaroo idea rather than starting fresh. The brand understands that the equity isn’t just commercial, it’s cultural. A kangaroo borrowed from a penny in the 1940s, given wings, then gradually streamlined for the jet and then the superjumbo age, has become one of aviation’s most enduring marks — proof that the strongest identities are the ones a company is disciplined enough to keep improving without ever letting go.

Read across the whole arc, Qantas’s story lands on a familiar but essential truth: distinctiveness plus consistency equals value. It is not enough to be different once; a brand must be recognisably, reliably itself across decades, contexts and formats. That reliability is what lets meaning accumulate, until a shape or a colour or a name can summon an entire set of associations in a single instant. Every strong identity arrives at the same place by a different road — a clear idea, expressed simply, and then defended patiently for as long as the brand endures.

A clean, confident wordmark beside the red tail.

The Qantas wordmark is a clean, modern sans in confident capitals, paired with the red kangaroo tail. The specimen below stands in with a neutral sans.

One bold Australian red. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

Qantas is built on a bold red #E40000 (variants #EE0000 / #E0001B circulate), with white and charcoal. Lead with the red below.

Keep the Flying Kangaroo idea on hand — save the tail-fin homage and the red to a board.