The Rowley Line
To the end of his life, C.D. Rowley regarded the view that “a person with European ‘blood’ is not a ‘real’ native, Aboriginal, Papuan or what have you” as “one of the less forgiveable myths of the colonial system” because “it dismisses the fact that culture and belief systems are not inherited with skin colour.”[1] Yet almost forty years after he first published it, the Rowley Line, or the division between Aboriginal people located on either side of it, remains an ongoing feature of non-Indigenous Australia’s response to Indigenous Australia – nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the case of Indigenous art. In 2009, it would be neither acceptable nor possible to draw such a line: the Census no longer asks Indigenous respondents to divide themselves into ‘part’ and ‘full-blood’ cohorts of Aboriginality, and the very use of these terms would be considered highly offensive by many Aboriginal people. Yet the Line was reproduced in the 2005 Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia[2] without explanation of the basis on which it was originally drawn (or Rowley’s intentions in drawing it) and with the currently preferred terminology of ‘remote’ alongside Rowley’s original ‘colonial’. As a geographic representation of this “frontier within the Australian psyche”, the Line seemed an ideal way of designating the artists in our survey that neither presumed what we set out to find – like ‘urban’, nor relied on negative characterisations – like ‘non-remote’. It was as just such an “intellectual tool” that Rowley originally devised it[3].
[1] C. D. Rowley Recovery: The Politics of Aboriginal Reform (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1986), 22.
[2] Bill Arthur & Frances Morphy (Gen. eds) Macquarie atlas of Indigenous Australia: culture and society through space and time (North Ryde, NSW: Macquarie Library, 2005), 70.
[3] “our boundary between the two regions is no more than an intellectual tool to get to grips, as it were, with both facets of the social problem, and was made possible by omitting the town populations of the north from our calculations” C.D. Rowley The Remote Aborigines (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1972), 20