Ingenious

Victa Rotomo 18 Lawnmower.

Meagan Oglesby 3139502

The growth of cities and the expansion of public transport and roads from the turn of the century through to the end of WW2 resulted in the mass migration of the average Australian family into the suburbs. It was the realization of; “the great Australian dream” “owning your own home, on a quarter acre block”. To mow the front lawn and cut the back grass as a weekly ritual of social, material and sentimental significance. The smell of freshly mown grass and the vision of a sweeping lawn would have brought forth a memory of a more rural past or seen as originally the precinct of the wealthy.

Invented by Mervin Victor Richardson in 1952 in his garage in the suburbs of Sydney, the Victa Rotomo 18 was the first successful, mass produced, rotary lawn mower in Australia. So popular was it that its sales rose from 30 mowers in the first three months to 143,000 in the year of 1958. With its two stroke engine and spinning blades it made easy work of most lawns. Its predecessor, the reel lawnmower, whilst producing a cleaner cut, were heavy and cumbersome machines that required regular maintenance and struggled in wet and rugged conditions.

The Victa Lawn mower became and still is an Australian Icon.

“The heart of a lawn mower is the sound it makes – the sound of the suburbs” (Franklin, A, 2007 )

The peaceful Saturday mornings interrupted by the grinding hum of a lawnmower has become part of the weekend. The smell of freshly cut lawn pervading the day. Dad filling the mower up with petrol and starting it up, his bright red earmuffs and his walkman on. Impossible to talk to. Getting annoyed that pebbles from the path had been kicked into the lawn, making an awful noise as they ricocheted around the metal cover and then became dangerous projectiles that could fly out in any direction. This resulted in the dog diving for cover when the lawn mower appeared.

The idealism of the suburbs grew out of four beliefs: “evangelicalism which sanctified domestic privacy, sanitary science which preached the importance of fresh air, romanticism which inculcated a reverence for nature, and class-consciousness, which spread the demand for exclusive bourgeois neighborhoods.” (G. Davison 1998) In Australia the exclusives fled to the suburbs to distance themselves from the convict associations of the towns. But working class immigrants soon followed, settling on their own quarter-acre blocks, with a few chickens. By 1890 Australia was more suburbanized than any other country in the world. Suburbs sprouted up along the railway lines and along roads. The depression of the 1930s slowed the sprawl of suburbia but by the conclusion of World War Two the dream of owning a home in the suburbs was once again a reality. Many returning soldiers would build their own homes. “The suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s were the “incubator for the post-war baby-boomers, their family ethos inseparable from the generation that gave them shape”. In the 1960s Australia was proclaimed “the first suburban nation” as there was clear statistical evidence showing that the majority of Australian’s lived in suburbia. (G. Davison 1998)

The lawn was originally seen as something of class, neatly manicured for the aristocrats of the late 18th Century. This ideal was somewhat kept up through the centuries and across the western world. A sweeping lush lawn was something to admire. The wealthier class who found themselves in Australia saw no reason to discontinue this tradition even though growing a lawn in Australia is not like growing a lawn in England. The harsh Australian climate requires grass to be watered regularly. However as in most cases, if the upper class does it, the middleclass aspires for it. Australia was and is home to a huge middle class, and where do most of them live? In the suburbs, in the land of front lawns and back yards.

Lawnmowers didn’t always have motors. In fact when lawns first came into vogue in the late eighteenth century in Europe, the cutting of grass involved employing numerous people to come out in the early mornings when the dew was still on the ground and cut the grass with scythes. (It was a large enough industry to cause an outcry when horse drawn mechanical cutters were being implemented.) Eventually the lawnmower evolved into a cylindrical machine that one man could push, with reasonable effort, across his lawn creating a reasonable if not satisfactory result. But it was hard work and on uneven ground even more difficult.

The Victa Lawn mower was not the first rotary lawn mower. There were products being manufactured overseas that functioned similarly. Neither was the Victa Lawn mower the first of its kind in Australia. Mervyn Victor Richardson the inventor of the Victa mower, had seen a demonstration of a rotary lawn mower, however it ran off a boat motor constructed into a steel frame and required two people to pull it with a rope. Richardson obviously felt he could do better and a few years later built a prototype; a two stroke engine turned on its side connected to a rotating a disc with blades mounted into it. A peach tin was the fuel can. Everything was mounted into a light metal frame with wheels. It was light weight, easy to push and effectively cut grass, including overgrown grass and weeds. It didn’t take long for word to spread (let alone the noise it made) about Richardson’s lawnmower. People desired this machine that could cut down the time and energy required to mow their lawns. The interest in his lawn mower motivated Richardson to manufacture mowers to sell. In1952 he and his family began building lawn mowers in their garage, he called them the Victa Rotomo 18. He sold thirty in the first three months of business. Within two years he had sold 20,000 Victa brand models in Australia and was beginning to export. “By 1958 Victa was producing over 143,000 lawn mowers a year and employing three thousand Australians to do it.” (abc.net.au/tv/collectors). Victa launched a huge advertising campaign using “Slogans such as ‘Don’t be the last man on your street to own a Victa’ and ‘Summer weekends are too precious to waste’” encouraged homeowners to ‘have the kind of smooth, trim lawn everyone admires’ without sacrificing hours of the weekend.” And “In January 1959 the public were told that ‘over 250 000 Australian families turn grass into lawn with Victa mowers’. In 2002 Victa celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, its total sales had reached 2.5 million, from victa’s small backyard beginnings it had become an Australian icon. Victa proudly said this about themselves on their website: “Victa is an icon brand that's still proudly made in Australia. We are glad that the community recognises Victa as a lifestyle brand of choice. A whole routine was even dedicated to Victa at the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games! Over the the past five decades, Victa has earned a reputation for innovation, strong performance and rock-solid reliability. Today's generation of user-friendly Victa mowers maintain that heritage. By listening to our customers we have also evolved our products to meet the demands of a changing climate and increasingly diverse lifestyle” (Victa, 2004 )

The Victa Rotomo 18 is my ingenious object. It was the first mass manufactured Victa model, made in the mid to late 1950s. It’s sixty years old, and it shows. Its years of wear and tear have removed much of its green paint, its Victa badge, that would have attached via the two empty screw holes in the front is missing, the air inlet is bent. It looks as though it might still work. Like Richardson’s prototype the petrol tank sits above the engine feeding it with petrol using gravity. The petrol used would have been standard leaded petrol with oil mixed in to keep the bearings lubricated. The throttle which is rather small and somewhat elegant sits in the middle at the top of the handle. The wheels are plastic and rubber and are rather crudely welded onto the blade cover which looks like an overturned dish or saucer. The height of the blades are adjusted by tightening or loosening the bolts on each wheel. There is no guard or catcher.

Lawn mowers have a masculine feel about them, their obvious motors, odours and manly colours such as dark greens and reds make it quite clear who they are aimed at. But this aim at the male market is most likely because the early lawnmowers were so difficult to push and required a quantity of strength that therefore the role of lawn cutting was given to the men, whilst she was inside vacuuming ,a tradition that has carried through to the modern day. Maybe it’s something to do with engines and petrol? Although there was a short stint in the 1960s when electric mowers were very popular, a man wouldn’t be seen near one. They were aimed at women and looked a little like a vacuum cleaner. They were branded with such names as “Safety Shaw” and “Flymo air-cushion” mower. But word soon got around that if your wife sliced through the electric cord she could be electrocuted. Its popularity died down soon after.

Surprisingly petrol driven lawn mowers have changed little over the last fifty years, things have become a little bit more automatic, a little bit more people friendly, such as they are easier to start, have improved grass catching, and are lighter and easier to push and maynover. Lawns haven’t changed much either, maybe only our attitude to them. The suburban sprawl still spreads, but people don’t necessarily want so much lawn, with the rise in the price of land, the block sizes tend not to have the space to warrant a lawn, also the changing design in landscaping that has seen more courtyards built. People are busier and have different priorities to fifty years ago, there isn’t necessarily the time or motivation to cut the grass. A lot of people prefer to outsource the job resulting in the rise of such franchises as Jim’s Mowing. There are better things to do than mow grass on Saturdays.


Reference:

Powerhouse Museum Victa Archives 2006 94/1/59, P3646
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/australia_innovates/view/sell.html

http://www.victa.com.au Copyright 2004 Victa
http://www.victa.com.au/index.cfm?p=F465A3BC-A357-47D2-B8C8228AB43F3904
http://www.victa.com.au/index.cfm?p=3D987695-A508-49DC-85DC6EC55D64BFBC

Adrian Franklin The collectors ABC March 2007
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/collectors/txt/s1873495.htm

Victa badge.
Ebay Item number: 300107924664 May 07
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/VICTA-18-SPECIAL-ROTOMO-BADGE_W0QQitemZ280120568697QQcmdZViewItem

Peter Timms
The story of the ordinary suburban garden. Australia’s Quarter Acre
The Miegun Press 2006 Australia

The Oxford Companion to Australian History
Graeme Davison, John Hurst, Stuart Macintyre
Oxford University press 1998