The Barassi Line is an imaginary line in Australia which approximately divides areas where Australian rules football is the most popular football code from those where rugby football is more widely followed, particularly rugby league but also rugby union. On either side of the line, crowd figures, media coverage, and participation rates tend to favour the locally dominant code.4174.0 - Sports Attendance, Australia, 2005-06 ; Australian Bureau of Statistics; 25 January 2007: "Notably, the states and territories which had low attendance rates for rugby league had the highest attendance rates for Australian rules football."
While the term was coined by historian Ian Turner in his 1978 Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture,Referenced in the divide emerged much earlier, in the 1880s, and became firmly established by the early 20th century. Roughly speaking, the line follows Queensland's western border, drops southeast through western New South Wales (NSW), and ends at Cape Howe on the New South Wales–Victoria border. As a result, Queensland and NSW's eastern population centres fall on the rugby side, while Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and New South Wales' Riverina, Murray, and Far West regions fall on the Australian rules side. The line also runs through the Australian Capital Territory, where Australian rules and rugby enjoy comparable levels of grassroots support, although only elite rugby competitions have established representative teams there. The line splits the population roughly in half, owing to the concentration of Australians on the east coast.
In the 1980s, state leagues and competitions began expanding beyond the Barassi Line, with varying levels of success and financial support.Funding of AFL clubs revealed in massive $100m gap from rich and poor by Ben Cotton from Fox Sports 8 March 2022Melbourne Storm Financials from FootyIndustry.com 5 October 2016Melbourne Rebels may have traded insolvent since 2018: PwC by Zoe Samios Business reporter 25 Apr 2024Winners and losers: The 2023 AFL club funding ladder revealed by Jake Niall for The Age 3 February 2023 Four clubs in the Australian Football League (AFL), the elite Australian rules competition, currently compete beyond the line: Sydney Swans (relocated 1982), Brisbane Lions (formed 1996), Gold Coast Suns (2009), and Greater Western Sydney Giants (2010). The Brisbane Bears (1987–1996) also competed in the league before merging to form the Lions.AFL sank its claws into Queensland thanks to Christopher Skase and the Brisbane Bears By Solua Middleton ABC Gold Coast 22 March 2020 In rugby league, the only current National Rugby League (NRL) club based beyond the line is the Melbourne Storm (formed 1997). Defunct rugby league teams include the WA Reds (1995–1997)'Stop the fight': Western Reds legends call for introduction of Perth-based NRL team Nine Wide World of Sports 6 August 2023 and Adelaide Rams (1997–1998).What happened to the Adelaide Rams? The formation and demise of rugby league’s forgotten club by Kye Kuncoro for Sporting News 4 May 2023 The Super Rugby club Western Force (formed 2005) is currently the only professional rugby union team beyond the line, following the dissolution of the Melbourne Rebels (2009–2024).Fate of women's team still to be decided The NRL also uses its annual State of Origin series as a promotions vehicle on the AFL side of the Barassi Line. Active expansion bids include Cairns (AFL) and Perth (NRL).
The Barassi Line is regarded as globally unique and arguably Australia's "strongest sociogeographic dividing characteristic". Most other sports are unaffected by the divide; for example, cricket has maintained broad national popularity, while soccer is also popular throughout Australia.
Origin of the term
The Ron Barassi Memorial Lecture was a series of lectures named after Ron Barassi Sr. given between 1966 and 1978 by Ian Turner, a professor of history at Monash University.D. B. Waterson, Turner, Ian Alexander Hamilton (1922 - 1978) , Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 424-425. Barassi Sr. played a number of Australian rules football games for Melbourne in the Victorian Football League (VFL) before enlisting to fight in World War II and subsequently dying in action at Tobruk.
The Barassi Line itself was named after Ron Barassi Jr., the elder Barassi's son, who was a star player for Melbourne and Carlton and a premiership-winning coach with Carlton and North Melbourne. He believed in spreading the code of Australian rules football around the nation with an evangelical zeal, and became coach and major supporter of the relocated Sydney Swans. He foresaw a time when Australian rules football clubs from around Australia, including up to four from New South Wales and Queensland, would play in a national football league with only a handful of them based in Melbourne, but his ideas were largely ridiculed at the time.Hess, Rob and Nicholson, Matthew. Beyond the Barassi Line: The Origins and Diffusion of Football Codes in Australia
History and development of Australia's football divide
There is documentary evidence of "foot-ball" being played by British colonists and military in Australia as early as the 1820s. These games were poorly documented but appear to have been informal, one-off affairs.
Origin of Australian rules football (1859)
In 1858, cricketers, sports' enthusiasts and school students began to regularly play variants of English public school football in the parklands of Melbourne.The following year, four members of the newly formed Melbourne Football Club codified the laws which was later known as Victorian rules and Australian rules football.The code reached Sydney in NSW in 1865, Brisbane in Queensland by 1866 and had been played in other colonies by 1868. However despite an explosion in popularity in Victoria, it struggled to gain acceptance outside of its home colony.
Arrival of rugby (1870) Rugby football became organised in Sydney, NSW, in 1870 with the formation of the Wallaroo FC. In 1874 the city's clubs and schools organised into the Southern Rugby Football Union (SRFU / now the NSWRU). While the last Australian rules club in Sydney had gone defunct in 1868, the SRFU nevertheless adopted a by-law stipulating that its members (clubs and schools) could only play matches against other members, effectively making the formation of any new Australian rules club on its own futile.
Australian rules and rugby vie for dominance in the north (1870s) Intercolonial rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne was by far the strongest with the Victorian colony surpassing it as Australia's most prominent city just a decade after its separation. While Australian rules remained dominant in Queensland, rugby began to prove a strong competitor in its capital Brisbane as interest in intercolonials against New South Wales began to grow. However Victorian rules began to increase its southern footprint with South Australia and Tasmania in the late 1870s, adopted the code to facilitate through representative matches against Victoria. The decision was made easier given the similarities to their own code and the Victorian code would grow there virtually unopposed. While slow to grow initially, rugby by the 1880s had become firmly established in Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.Meanwhile, both Brisbane (QFA) and Sydney (NSWFA) had Australian rules bodies and clubs.
Divide begins to form (1880s–1890s) Queensland followed Sydney in 1884 when the colony's largest schools there voted to switch to rugby, causing the collapse of the code by there by the end of that decade.Ronald Lawson, University of Queensland Press, 1973, page 203 By the 1890s, Australian rules was extinct in Sydney and Brisbane with rugby spreading virtually unopposed throughout the respective colonies of New South Wales and Queensland. In Queensland, the Northern Rugby Football Union successfully banned the Australian code and rugby's popularity rose through success in intercolonial matches with New South Wales. As Australian rules gradually recovered its position in New South Wales, the Southern Rugby Football Union, the colony's governing football body introduced a ban on the Victorian code as early as 1874 to prevent its spread across the Victorian border.A Brief History of Football in Wagga. The Riverina Weekender. 23 February 2013 While it was not able to halt the Australian code, it severely impaired its growth until the turn of the century.
In the 1890s Australian rules began to surpass rugby union as the dominant code in Western Australia by the turn of the 20th Century and clear north-east/west divide between Australian rules and rugby territory had begun to form.
Australian rules experienced a national resurgence at the turn of the century however Rugby League's introduction in 1908 ushered in professionalism which after World War I firmly established the code over rugby union in Sydney and Brisbane respectively, with the governing bodies assisting to spread this code through the major cities to the remote areas of the state mainly through school football. Rugby league's spread however met resistance in areas where Australian rules remained strong, such as the Riverina and Broken Hill in New South Wales as well as the Northern Territory which had developed a strong Australian rules following after the war. In the newly declared territories of the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory both codes would at times compete for marketshare, though Australian rules would continue to prove dominant.
Battle lines drawn in the Riverina (1920s-40s)
The introduction of inter-town challenge cup football contests to rugby league (such as the Maher Cup) saw a rapid rise in the code's popularity in the Riverina towns over Australian rules. In 1946, rugby league authorities convinced the NSW government to ban Australian rules in public schools in an effort to oust it from the Riverina, which resulted in schools previously playing the code in its major heartlands of Albury and Wagga switching to rugby league.
At the time the term was first used, existing club competitions were semi-professional and state-based. The first national club football competitions emerged in the late 20th century: the Championship of Australia, the NFL Night Series and the National Soccer League.
Code wars as national competitions professionalise and expand (1980s) In the 1980s, the VFL and NSW Rugby League premiership (and Amco Cup) began a period of professionalism and expansion, forming the basis of today's Australian Football League (AFL) and National Rugby League (NRL).
Given the dominance of Australian rules and rugby league on either side, other codes have also been slow to establish sustainable national competitions. The multinational body SANZAAR, which organises the Super Rugby competition in rugby union, expanded their domestic competitions in 1996 to include teams from both sides. Football Federation Australia revamped its flagship competition, the A-League, to focus on a more nationally balanced competition in 2005. Its current composition reflects association football's participation and growth per capita, which is by far strongest in the east (where it faces less competition with Australian rules).
Current status
Australian rules football is now the most popular football code to the west and south, including the capitals of Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Hobart, and Darwin while rugby league is more popular on the eastern side, including the capitals of Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. Each side represents roughly half of the Australian population due to the concentration of the population on the east coast.