Meet an Australian writer who sells an awful lot of books. She writes a type of novel called romance novels.


PAUL WILLIS: Fashion is a fickle business, changing all the time but scientists are finding the Aussie body is changing shape almost as fast, and fashion is not keeping up. A cry of discontent is coming up from the women of Australia - they can't get clothes that fit! Remarkably the human body is evolving and it's happening over a very short period of time.

unlikely partnership
Fashion and science are now forming an to find just how fast we're changing. It all started with award winning fashion designer Daisy Veitch. She started making her own clothes because she could never find anything to fit.

She discovered the problem was the measurements used by clothing manufacturers. They're up to eighty years out of date. To make clothes to fit people in the 21st century Daisy needed to know how we've changed. She turned to anatomist Professor Henneberg for help. He is a man who likes to look at bodies. Although he usually looks at dead ones, he suggested they join forces and undertake a serious size survey of living Australian bodies.

So science and fashion have embarked upon a mammoth task - to find out just how the Australian body has changed shape since the last survey done in 1926. Professor Henneberg's usual workplace is the human dissection labs at Adelaide University. His motive for the size survey wasn't fashion.

It was his fascination with micro-evolution - the study of changes in the body from generation to generation. Micro-evolutionists have found the human body is actually evolving over a remarkably short period of time.

Henneberg is hoping the size survey will expand his knowledge of micro-evolution and the preliminary findings do show Aussies are a unique breed. We're evolving quite differently from our European and American counterparts.

PROF HENNEBERG: Australians are not getting much taller over the last sixty years, but we are getting much heavier and wider.

PAUL WILLIS: Meanwhile the fashion industry will take on board these evolutionary findings. Daisy hopes once the data is processed women of all shapes and sizes should finally be able to go into a store and come away with their dream dress.

DAISY VEITCH: What we hope to do with it is we hope to produce mannequins that represent average Australians and we want to produce them in a range of sizes to take into account the way a human body changes when it gets fatter. So we will produce garments that fit much better at the extremes.

PAUL WILLIS: And that will mean a lot of very happy Australian ladies!