Joseph Lycett's paintings in Newcastle in the early 1800s show Aboriginal people looking full of health and vigour.
Living the outdoors life clearly had its benefits for the Indigenous people.
This is what came to mind as we watched the new documentary, titled Lycett and Wallis: Unlikely Preservers of Aboriginal Knowledge.
University of Newcastle Emeritus Professor John Maynard said many early settlers commented on the good health of the Aboriginal people.
Professor Maynard said the "physical presence" of the First Nations people - including their height - was admired among the colonials.
Seafood - known for its health benefits - was a big part of their diet. They also ate a large variety of fruits, nuts, roots, vegetables, grasses and seeds, along with meats such as kangaroo, porcupine, emu, possum, goanna and turtles.
This was a real paleo diet.
Professor Maynard said a British marine officer wrote about "watching Aboriginal women diving into what is now Newcastle Harbour and returning to the surface with lobsters three and four times the size of anything they'd ever seen in Europe".
"A midden wall ran from Newcastle Harbour all the way to Sandgate. This was a massive mountain of shells collected over thousands of years," he said.
He said there was "this myth that Aboriginal people were aimless wanderers and hunters and gatherers, wondering where their next feed is coming from".
"That might have been the case in arid central Australia with small groups, but populations of Aboriginal people on south-eastern Australia were large.
"The economic historian Noel Butlin estimated the Aboriginal population was somewhere over a million people in 1788. Then you've got to ask what happened to them?
"At the turn into the 20th century, 60 to 90 per cent of that population was gone."
He said a smallpox outbreak in Sydney in the 1780s decimated Aboriginal people.
Influenza, sexually transmitted diseases, chicken pox, measles and frontier warfare also claimed many lives.
"The depletion of resources and lack of access to them had a massive impact on their wellbeing."
Watch the film at storiesofourtown.com.
Shangri-La
Before the British arrived, the Aboriginal people seemed to be living in a Shangri-La of sorts.
The Lycett paintings show Indigenous people living happily in harmony with the land. They had access to plentiful fresh and healthy food, as well as bush medicine.
Professor Maynard said Lycett's artwork "clearly captures that this place was a virtual paradise of plenty".
And those with health problems could get medical attention.
"Aboriginal people had doctors and medicine people. A lot of that stuff now is being looked at by pharmaceutical companies and turned into medicines," he said.
"Amazingly, a pill that the D-Day invasion forces used to calm sea sickness was derived from Aboriginal medicine."
Shangri-La is a mythical story about a paradise in the Himalayas - a happy and secluded place where people age slowly and live for hundreds of years beyond their normal lifespan.
We wonder what the lifespan of Aboriginal people was before the British invasion. The facts on that, though, are obviously difficult to determine.
