Thanks to our reader, Tim, for sending us the above photo of Australian sheepshearers on their bicycles. The bicycle is credited rightly with improving the human gene pool in the way that it increased the mobility radius for people not only in cities but also in rural areas. After the invention of the bicycle and the subsequent bicycle boom in the late 1880's, family names that were previously rooted to specific towns or regions started showing up in the registries of (relatively) far-flung parishes in the UK. The same is true for rural America and Australia. The inexpensive independent mobility that the bicycle provided allowed men and women to travel farther further in the search for work and... well... TLC.
These photographs are from the Flickr photostream of the State Library of New South Wales.
Man on bicycle pillioning boy. Bunaloo, NSW, Australia. "Pillioning". There's a word you don't hear every day. I'm assuming that means the boy is standing up. As opposed to that other Australianism, "dinking".
