Bowie Gostelow’s mother, Rose, had to get permission from the Department of Native Affairs to marry her husband, a white pastoralist, as she was under the Aborigines Protection Act. Rose was raised at Silver Plains Station. Her father was an Irishman named Patrick Fox. Her mother died when she was only a week old, and Bowie is unsure about her ancestry, despite her being considered Aboriginal by the government. There was reluctance to talk about Rose Gostelow’s origins. In a book written by Bowie’s wife she is described as ‘Polynesian’, but Bowie recognises the possibility of Aboriginal ancestry.[41]
A preference for marrying within the community is apparent throughout Cape York Peninsula. Many people met their spouses through family and local connections. Bowie’s wife to be, Vivien Bell, was the daughter of an Endeavour River farming family and went to the same Cooktown school as Bowie, but was six years younger.[42]
In her memoir, Vivien Gostelow took a romantic view of her marriage. An episode on the journey to her new home at Violet Vale, when Vivien’s horse bolted, exemplifies her image of Bowie: ‘My wonderful sun-bronzed bushman, in his moleskins and legging, blue shirt and battered sombrero, rescued me so effortlessly, just as cowboys did in the movies.’[43] It is not surprising then that Vivien and Bowie fell in love through a shared interest in Westerns. Bowie was ill with his tonsils in Cooktown hospital, where 15-year-old Vivien was working: ‘When matron was not around, I slipped in to talk to him, found he liked reading Westerns, and took him some books on my afternoon off. That is how our romance began.’[44]
The romance in Vivien’s story is not only the love of a cowboy,[45] but the idealisation of pastoral life. Vivien describes a rural idyll of the station with its fruit trees, fresh milk and wholesome self-sufficiency, and of cattle droving with night-fires and singing. A central image in Vivien’s pastoral romance was her mother-in-law, the picturesque matriarch of a pioneer family.[46] The uncertainty around Rose’s heredity is interesting in this respect, for the pioneer woman is always contrasted against the ‘wild blacks’ and Rose Gostelow is no exception.[47] In Jon Simon’s terms: ‘Power relations should always be analysed in terms of adversarial struggle and confrontational strategies.’[48] While the construct of racial conflict remains in place, individuals slip through the gaps.