I have a very good friend who was enrolled in an Aboriginal Art course at a local institution. She tells the tale of how her Aboriginal Art teacher made her put some kind of patterned border or background on to her wildflower painting, "otherwise it won't be accepted as Aboriginal art". Some years ago now a gallery director told me of how a gallery goer stopped her, in mid sentence, as she tried to explain the significance of desert dot paintings. "That may be so", the punter remarked, "but I've seen too many of  those on stubby holders and bum bags to have one over my fireplace".

Julie Dowling brings a sense of irony to the much overused dots. In The Tourist, she has painted a group of hustling faces, two squinting into cameras, and all of them demanding to be entertained. They flank an Aboriginal boy, frantically gesturing for help, and he alone is outlined neatly by those glowing desert dots*.

The new found economic freedom that comes from making art for tourists must pressure many into playing a role of 'Aboriginal artist' that has more to do with tourism than real life. Cultural misappropriation is an ongoing concern. There have been numerous stories of white artists using, for example, desert dots in order to produce quick paintings and other souvenirs for the Aboriginal Art market.

Stylistically, Dowling achieves a deft, seamless merging of three diverse elements: portraiture, decoration and text.

Every single element of her paintings is there to be 'read'. Many of her smaller paintings are single chiaroscuro frontal portraits, mostly of family members.  The faces are bordered by close patterns of desert style dots, and in many cases, densely overwritten with utterances of her family members, or names of language groups, or snatches from popular songs.

Unlike many urban Aboriginal artists, Dowling is wholly humanistic in her concerns. She shows no interest in, for example, representing totemic animals or re-telling dreamtime stories. These are all stories of people that she knows.

The most disturbing painting for me was The Dance, a portrait of her grandparents on the day he proposed to her. Robert Dowling, a white RAAF officer, invited Mary Latham to a dance. In the painting they are seated on chairs in the foreground, he with his beer and she with her tea, and behind their backs two other RAAF-ies and one of their women are sneering at the white man with a black woman.

The bigotry doesn't end with the hanging of this painting. Someone in Robert's situation would have a hard time hanging this painting in a gallery if he had painted it himself.

*In the distance she has put a forest landscape, with little licks of white sunlight down the tree trunk sides. This may be read as a direct quote from the Carrolup mission style. Carrolup paintings are much collected and cherished by many Aboriginal people, often family members, but they have little acceptance elsewhere as 'Aboriginal art'. The first of these paintings were made by Noongar boys in their early teens at a wheat belt mission school just after the war. Supplied with paints but no instruction, Parnell Dempster, Revell Cooper, Claude Kelly and others evolved the landscape style from their own observations of nature and pictures in books.