A council email signature became Australia's newest culture war

A Sydney council serving roughly 240,000 people swapped a portrait of Captain James Cook for a light blue wave in its email signatures — and ended up on national breakfast television. That's the whole story. It's also, for designers, a warning.

Sutherland Shire Council, covering Sydney's south, rarely makes national press in Australia, let alone coverage in England 10,000 miles away. Yet in recent weeks it has sat at the centre of a row over its crest: an engraved portrait of Cook, who first came ashore on Australia's east coast at Kurnell, within the shire, in 1770.

What actually changed?

In July, council staff began favouring a newer, simpler logo across day-to-day communications. The mark is a light blue wave — simple, but an effective fit for an area on Australia's east coast.

To be clear, Cook has not been cancelled, removed or erased. The council moved the emblem featuring him to what it calls "civic, ceremonial and high-value corporate applications", while the newer mark handles uses like email signatures, where a simpler design works better. Different logo, specific use cases. That's all.

Councillor Haris Strangas objected — not to the design itself, but that nobody had asked him about the change. He tabled a motion to review the council's policy, then appeared on the Today show, a major national breakfast programme, to discuss it. In the clip, Strangas came across as a likeable, ordinary guy who said he didn't want to inflame the issue and acknowledged most people have better things to talk about. He didn't back down either. Others piled in with their own agendas, and the story spiralled from there.

Why does this history matter to designers?

Here's the part the coverage skipped. The shire has redesigned this identity repeatedly, and nobody noticed:

• In 2008, the council shrank Cook in favour of its name and a new colour scheme.
• Ahead of the 250th anniversary of Cook's landing, it restyled the portrait for digital screens.
• The wave logo itself dates back to 2017.

None of it made the national news. Big brands follow the same pattern. Mastercard dropped its name from its circles emblem in 2019. Volkswagen flattened its badge the same year. Burger King reverted to its retro bun in 2021. Pepsi brought back a bolder, blacker globe in 2023. Few people outside the design press batted an eyelid.

Logos are tools, not monuments. They get tweaked, updated or replaced when they look tired or stop working on small screens. That's not vandalism. It's maintenance.

What's the risk now?

The problem isn't the design decisions. It's that a rebrand is no longer just a rebrand. If people can turn a colour, a typeface or a kerning decision into a symbol of something bigger, they will. Politics has moved into the space where design decisions used to pass quietly.

And there's a caveat worth naming: history does matter, and communities should have a say in how they're represented. But Cook has not been erased. A council introduced a second logo for specific use cases.

The real damage lands on designers and their clients. The lesson many clients will draw from this — and from Cracker Barrel, Jaguar and the rest — is that it's safer never to change anything at all. That's bad for design, and bad for the organisations themselves, which end up stuck with identities that no longer work. Expect more inertia, and more scrutiny, before the next redesign gets signed off.