The Barassi Line

The Barassi Line

An attempt to plot the current path of the Barassi Line using the locations of all the Aussie Rules & Rugby League clubs in Australia.

This project was part of the inaugural Wikidata Fellowship program supported by Wikimedia Australia. Images in the header are from Wikimedia Commons (central top image by Ed Gold, the rest are public domain)

Last updated: December 2022.

In 1978, at the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture, historian Ian Turner suggested (partly seriously, partly in jest) the idea of the Barassi Line*, a hypothetical line that divided Australia roughly in two. On one side of the line - the south and west of the country - were those that primarily supported Aussie rules, and to the north and east were those that supported Rugby (both league and union). The suggested line was said to run from Canberra, though Broken Hill, Birdsville, and on to Maningrida in the NT 1, and at the time, there were no professional Aussie rules clubs on the league side, nor league clubs on the Aussie rules side. Melbourne even included Aussie rules as a demonstration sport when it hosted the Olympics in 1956 (Sydney however, did not include league in 2000). The idea of the line was not just that it was a boundary between two popular codes of football, it was also intended as a means of showing the 'cultural rift' in Australia.

“"Australia is divided by a deep cultural rift between the north and the south, known as the Barassi line. It runs between Canberra, Broken Hill, Birdsville, and Manangrita [sic], and it divides Australia between Rugby and Rules" - Ian Turner 1”

Not surprisingly, things have changed since Turner's speech, and both codes have made an effort to expand nationally. This has meant setting up clubs on the other side of the line, and both codes now have national competitions: the Australian Football League (AFL), and the National Rugby League (NRL). There's now a Rugby league club south of the line (in Melbourne), and four Aussie rules clubs to the north (two in Sydney, one on the Gold Coast, and one in Brisbane). Despite these changes however, the line is still used as a way of discussing the divided loyalties of Australians when it comes to these sports, and a more recent study - "The Barassi line: Quantifying Australia's great sporting divide" (2013) - showed that at least in terms of those watching on TV, the line still exists, as 93% of NRL viewership was from the league side, 81% of AFL's from the Aussie rules side. However, the line commonly drawn to show this divide is fairly crude (see below), and the most common representation is completely straight, so this project is an attempt to use club location data to see how closely the present day locations of clubs match the path of the Barassi Line as it's most commonly drawn, as well as test the idea of a clean dividing line between the two codes in general.

map of the Barassi Line, and pic of Ron Barassi

Above left: The Barassi Line as it's most commonly drawn (image from wikipedia). Other versions of the line with slight variations have appeared elsewhere such as the ABC, twitter, reddit etc. Above right: Ron Barassi, the line's namesake (fun fact: he attended the opening of a plaque marking part of the supposed location of the line at Wahgunyah on the NSW-Victorian border, which, at least according to this project, is around 100km too far south...)

The Approach.

The idea was to try and plot the current path of the line using the locations of all Aussie rules and Rugby league clubs in Australia. (Turner's original conceit compared Aussie rules to rugby in general, so both league AND union, but to keep it more manageable, I just focused on Aussie rules and Rugby league). The data was gathered from a variety of sources such as club and competition websites, Wikidata, Wikipedia, news articles, sport results sites, community websites, fan websites, local councils, OpenStreetMap, Google, Google Maps, social media etc. These clubs were then assigned to one of the suburbs & localities listed in the ABS's latest Suburbs and Localities (2021), and then the centroids of these suburbs/localities were calculated using Turf.js. The maps below encompass ---- football clubs in ---- different locations (as some locations had multiple clubs). Based on the number of Aussie rules clubs vs Rugby league clubs, locations were then marked as either Aussie rules or Rugby league depending on which code had the greater number (or equal if the number of clubs were the same). Then, in order to move from a discrete number of points, to polygons covering the whole of Australia, I used a Voronoi diagram. This creates cells which denote the area where a particular point, in this case a place where a particular code of football has more clubs, is the closest, and therefore (in theory at least) the dominant code in that area.

Obviously there's different approaches that I could have used, and there's a bunch of disclaimers to all this, as although I tried to ensure the data is accurate, with so many different sources, there's still likely to be a few mistakes, such as clubs I've missed, smaller clubs that have recently folded due to Covid, clubs placed in the wrong location, especially in remote areas etc. Also, all clubs have been treated equally, regardless of size, and the centroids are obviously an oversimplification of the actual towns and suburbs, plus the Voronoi cells generated are based purely on geographical distance, rather than actual proximity by travel time. However, despite all this, I reckon the sample size is large enough that the overall picture is still (hopefully) fairly accurate.

“"It was almost as if the nation had been built on sport: had acquired international significance from sport: sport seemed to be what Australia was 'about'. Playing games or watching them was to play one's role as an Australian" - Donald Horne (quoted by Turner in his lecture) 1”

Note: Rather than being hard-coded, all stats, cells, lines etc are dynamically generated via an external array of club data containing only the club name, location, state, latitude, longitude, and football code.

An Overview.

There were almost twice as many Aussie rules clubs as Rugby league ones, and Aussie rules was the more dominant code in five of the eight states and territories. Also, where Aussie rules was dominant, it was clearly dominant, with league making up just 18% of the two-code-preferred at most in Aussie rules states, and without a single Rugby league club (that I could find) in Tasmania. League on the other hand, even when the dominant code, still had a much higher percentage of Aussie rules clubs, with the ACT close to 50-50. This trend is clearly seen when compared to state populations, as the greatest ratio of league clubs to population in a league majority state or territory is 6 per 100,000 people** (NSW), whereas the lowest ratio of Aussie rules clubs to population in an Aussie rules majority state or territory is 9 per 100,000 people (WA). i.e. where Aussie rules is more popular it is much more popular. Overall Australia has - Aussie rules clubs and - Rugby League clubs per 100,000 people.

-
Aussie Rules clubs
-
Rugby League clubs

States/Territories with an Aussie Rules majority:

States/Territories with a Rugby League majority:

1 Club Locations.

The map below shows each location with an Aussie rules or rugby club as a dot, coloured by which code has the most clubs in that place (hover over the dots for a breakdown between the codes). Note how Australia is bookended west to east by league, with clubs in the Cocos Keeling Islands (the Cocos Keeling Islands Hunters), Christmas Island (the Christmas Island Robbers), and Norfolk Island (Norfolk Island Junior Rugby League - Lord Howe Island doesn't have a Rugby league club, but it does has a rugby union one, the Lord Howe Island Woodhens Rugby). In the north, league is the football of choice in the Torres Strait, whereas Aussie rules dominates in the Tiwi Islands and Arnhem Land. In the south, Aussie rules is clearly more popular, and there's not a single Rugby league club in all of Tasmania, despite no AFL club in the national competition (the North Warrnambool Warriors seem to be Australia's southernmost Rugby league club). There were - locations where there was an equal number of Aussie rules of Rugby league clubs, many around the NSW-Victorian border, but at a quick glance it looks like a clear divide, roughly along the suggested line, still exists.

Made with Leaflet, Tangram, and data copyright OpenStreetMap contributors

2 The Regions

This map uses Voronoi cells to show which code is most popular in the area (or if they are equally popular), based on the data in the map above. It's clear that Aussie rules is more popular in the west and south of the country, and apart from a few pockets in WA and the NT, Rugby League is mainly limited to the north east.

Made with Leaflet, Tangram, and data copyright OpenStreetMap contributors

3 The Current Line.

This map uses the same approach as the map above, but the Voronoi cells were recalculated using only locations where one code was dominant to show the main divide - the Barassi Line - between the two codes. Have added Turner's original description (pink) and the line as it's most commonly drawn (black) as dotted lines to see how they compare, as well as the plaque meant to mark part of the line near the towns of Corowa (NSW) and Wahgunyah (VIC). The line to the west shows the divide between WA and the Cocos (Keeling) & Christmas islands.

Made with Leaflet, Tangram, and data copyright OpenStreetMap contributors

All Locations.

These lists show all locations where either an Aussie rules or Rugby league club exists, grouped by the dominant sport in that area. Towns marked with an asterisk in the lists below are those on the 'other' side of the Barassi Line (i.e. Aussie Rules towns to the north and east of the line and Rugby League towns to the south and west). Interestingly, the proportion of clubs on 'their' side of the line was roughly similar, at ~85%.

Aussie Rules clubs on either side of the Barassi Line:

Rugby League clubs on either side of the Barassi Line:

Locations with more Aussie rules clubs

-

Locations with more Rugby league clubs

-

Locations with an equal number of Aussie Rules & Rugby league clubs

in total

View all the club data on Wikidata or, if you're so inclined, you can find your nearest Aussie rules club here or Rugby league club here.


* No doubt a play on the concept of the "Brisbane Line", and despite its mention at the Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture, the name of the line actually refers to Ron Barassi's son (also called Ron Barassi), and deemed by Turner as the most widely known Aussie rules player at the time. Also, it's been pointed out that even the term 'Aussie rules', tends to be used only by those north of the line (where I'm from), but have used it here given that was the term Turner used in his speech.

** All population data via the ABS

1. "The greatest game (Barassi Memorial Lecture, Prahran College of Advanced Education, 1978)." Overland, (76/77), pp. 32–41