Bowler’s father was a fisherman who came from Ireland to farm in Leongatha, southern Victoria.

[2] He spent his adolescence and young adulthood working as a farmer and rancher, growing potatoes and herding cattle.

He left farming in his mid-twenties and enrolled at the University of Melbourne where he studied geology and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1958, and later, a Masters in 1961.

He received his PhD in 1970, for his thesis "Late quaternary environments: a study of lakes and associated sediments in south-eastern Australia.

The human remains he found, and their subsequent radiocarbon dating, contributed to the historical rewriting of the timeline for Aboriginal settlement.