With its duration still open to scholarly debate, the Industrial Revolution spanned at least eighty years from the 18th century into the 19th. It changed the way we moved through the world as markedly as the advent of agriculture had, some 12,000 years before. Naturally the transition from foragers to farmers was too, a revolution (the Neolithic one) and with that one lasting more than 2,000 years from go to whoa, by comparison the Industrial Revolution was indeed fast and furious. 

Paleogenomic research, which recovers and decodes ancient genetic material from the likes of calcified dental plaque, finds that the Neolithic Revolution changed more about humans than simply a paddock-to-plate diet.

As humans transitioned to farming, there was a dramatic change in 49 bacterial species found in oral microbiome. Earlier Palaeolithic samples showed no strong presence of the bacteria species Campylobacter and Capnocytophaga which can cause gum disease. Throughout the Neolithic Period specimens they became increasingly more common; proving most prevalent in the samples from the end of the Copper Age.

Certainly, both the agricultural and industrial ages were more complicated than is generally learned at school; which is of course only possible with the Industrial Revolution making education compulsory for all children up to the age of 10. Rationale dictates that mandatory learning would have somehow eventuated, but who knows how and when it may have otherwise come about. So we have the Industrial Revolution (or more specifically the British government) to thank for the daily minimum of 2 hours of readin’, ritin’ and ‘rithmatic for factory workin’ kids.

Bizarre, huh. Living the life of a mature-age student before you’re even close.

It took another thirty years, and a whole different continent for the first government to make education not only secular and compulsory, but free; and for 6 to 15-year-olds to attend five days a week unless they had a reasonable excuse not to. (Suffering dysentery, cholera or typhoid would’ve made that list; along with caring for a consumptive parent.) The Education Act 1872 happened in Australia, just over 80 years after colonisation – a time period akin to the stretch of the Industrial Revolution.

The definition of a ‘revolution’ is the rapid and fundamental change to the established order of social, legal and land rights – which did in fact occur for more than 400 culturally distinct groups of First Nations people in 1788. Since it didn’t happen from within, it’s not referred to as a ‘revolution’ but rather a ‘settlement’ without the slightest hint of irony, considering the completely unsettling way it was done.

Moreover, this secular, compulsory and free education as a requirement of childhood from the beginning of 1873, made no mention in any part of its curriculum of the widespread massacre of First Nations people through disease, displacement, dispossession and destruction that had gone on since 1788.

The explanation for this erasure of fact from the teachings of that time, is that colonists viewed them as no more than part of the country’s strange fauna and equal as nothing but an impediment to the development of farming and grazing land.

More than a hundred and fifty years later, we arrive in 2024. Where we’re still more comfortable having an annual, unresolved, historically illiterate and histrionic wrangle every January over whether it’s necessary or appropriate to change the date, reason or recognition of the 26th day of that month, than we are properly addressing the cult of forgetfulness that is a large part of the recorded and accepted history of Australia.

It’s what we like about history. If the wrong bits are repeated long enough and loud enough, they’re indisputable. Then they’re irrefutable. AI’s going to help us along with that, for sure.

Research tells us that as humans, we’re naturally wired to blame external circumstances for things that haven’t gone to plan. Not being accountable for our own behaviour is a defensive stance that hinders progress, and suffocates the chance of finding creative solutions.

And we’re really comfortable with that.

We like the idea of holding the Industrial Revolution responsible for two of the most common afflictions in the world: cavities and gum disease. We don’t acknowledge that in the same year kids in Australia were happily or unhappily in the classroom, the US was churning out commercial toothpaste.

Studies tell us that until Alexander the Great brought sugar to Greece in the 4th century, fewer than 10% of Europeans had cavities. An increase was first noticed in the Greeks, then the Romans. Soon, throughout the Middle Ages, was a gradual decline in the oral health of Europeans that continued for the next fourteen hundred years.

Eventually, the biggest spike in dental decay coincided with the years 1800 to 1850 – the same time Britain was importing far more sugar from the West Indies in order to fuel the transition of economic reliance from agriculture to machine.

Thus the Industrial Revolution had arrived with its own sweet story.

It didn’t bring with it any knowledge or understanding of the bacteria that causes cavities and gum disease; or the necessities that constitute the maintenance of good oral health. By the 1950s somewhere between 50-90% of the world population was not enjoying optimal oral health.

The controversial water fluoridation programme of the 1970s rectified many issues of childhood tooth decay. Fifty years of continuing dental research and studies since, technology allows us the easiest access to the greatest bank of knowledge in terms of what causes cavities and the treatments available, and yet children between the ages of 2 and 5 are experiencing the worst dental health in decades.

Dentists designate constant snacking, and the sugars in fruit juices and soft drinks as the culprits; along with inadequate – and sometimes non-existent – oral hygiene routines implemented and adhered to by parents and guardians.

No mention of the Industrial Revolution.

That sort of blaming isn’t going to get you to take better care of your teeth and gums. It doesn’t get you to make regular appointments with your dentist. Technically – along with the microbial variations that came with agriculture and livestock – it could be true; but why stop there? Clearly it’s the fault of the Big Bang.

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