Back in the happy days before the white imperialist invaders came to Australia’s shores everyone was happy, healthy and contented. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.

If you weren’t healthy then you would die. A hunter gatherer community, that lived from day to day, needed everybody to be contributing to making their society work.

So if you weren’t healthy, and couldn’t keep up when your clan moved on, then you weren’t of much use and you would soon die.

So life in Australia before the arrival of the English was unforgiving. It takes a society that can farm and produce more than enough for each day, that can store the surplus for the future, to be able to allow people who aren’t contributing to what’s available for everyone to stay alive.

But things weren’t all fun in England at the time when Governor Philip brought the First Fleet to Australia. His job was to set up a small penal colony on the east coast of Australia. Period. He wasn’t a conqueror. He set up the new colony at Sydney Cove, not Botany Bay which had seemed like the place to aim for from Captain Cook’s reports of his first voyage. There were no plans of conquering the continent. The spread of settlers across Australia got totally out of hand. It was the result of individuals who decided that they actually liked living in Australia and would like to make a real go of it. And it was the sheep brought to Australia that made that spreading out from Sydney happen.

For at least half of the people who were left back in England, and probably much more than that, things weren’t in a lot of respects nearly as good as they were for the nomadic Aborigines living in Australia. The Australian aborigines mostly had a warm climate so that they didn’t need heavy clothing to keep them warm for a good part of the year, without which they’d die. Generally the aborigines had a plenty of food. They had a level of medical help that was no better and no worse than what most Europeans living in rural villages had. But things in Europe were on the cusp of a monumental change that would radically alter the balance between living in Europe in the eighteenth century and living in the Australia of 60,000 years before. The industrial revolution.

But even with those changes that the industrial revolution brought, having people live in the crowded European cities of the industrial revolution, with poor to no sanitation, appalling air quality, terrible diet, was having a dramatic effect. It was an effect that it turned out to be one that governments couldn’t ignore. It was because of war and the threat of war that these health and fitness problems were going to be soon addressed and eventually fixed. This is the story of how we all got to have gyms and fitness centres everywhere, good food, and healthy living that took advantage of all of the advances that had been made through the industrial revolution but had not yet delivered better lives to everyone.

Tag words: Second Boer War; British Army; The Committee on Physical Deterioration; Charles Bean; Generals without brains and an army without physique; Field Marshall Haig; Pompey Elliot; Trades Union Congress; Labour Representation Committee; Labour Party; Workers’ Compensation insurance; Karl Marx; Das Kapital; Governor Philip; First Fleet; Sydney Cove; Botany Bay; industrial revolution; Mark Zuckerberg; Yuval Noah Harari; Homo Deus; Rudyard Kipling; Great War;