Frederick Matthias Alexander was an Australian, born in Wynyard, Tasmania, on 20th January, 1869. As a young man he travelled to Melbourne to have lessons in acting, elocution and violin. His ambition was to become an actor and a dramatic reciter. Unfortunately he found that during a performance he would lose his voice and, because doctors could give him no lasting help, he decided to do something about it himself. As he didn't normally lose his voice, he came to the conclusion that it must have been something he was doing to himself that caused his problem. He watched himself carefully in mirrors to see if he could pinpoint the problem. What he found was that it was the misuse of his body which caused his voice to fade. He also realised that he misused himself in this particular way every time he spoke but it was under the pressure of stress and performance that his habits became more pronounced causing his voice to disappear.

As he worked on stopping the habits that were inhibiting him, he became quite a remarkable performer and people came asking to take lessons from him. He became known as the "breathing man" because of his control of taking a breath that wasn't noisy. Unfortunately he then had to make the difficult choice between performing and teaching and he chose teaching.

Medical doctors became interested in his work as they saw it benificial for their patients and it was through the influence of physician and surgeon, W. J. Stewart McKay that Alexander, in 1904, went to London.

In 1908 Dr.Alexander Leeper on a trip overseas was instructed to gather relevant information from other countries to help structure some sort of physical education in Victorian schools. Leeper met Alexander and decided that Alexander's work was the answer. Unfortunately Leeper's enthusiastic report was ignored so that the Alexander Technique was never taught to Victorian school children before they developed bad and debilitating habits.

However Alexander built himself an enormous teaching practice and had many influencial friends in London. During the First World War he spent half his time teaching in America. He never returned to Australia and it wasn't until 1950 that Australia got its first Alexander Technique teacher.