OGDEN lawn mower

**This is an example - none of the information has been checked. But is gives you some ideas on how a statement of significance can be written - but it has to be much better than this - I knocked this up in about 2 minutes**

The Ogden Power Mower

The Ogden Power Mower is an important example of the role that suburban lifestyle played in Australian industrial design and manufacturing in the years after the close of the second world war. This was a period of comparative affluence for people that had been children in the great depression of the 1930s and had sacrificed a great deal in the war years. Products such as this mower represent the hope and pride of that generation and the faith in material posessions as a way towards a safer and happier future. New homes of the time had large gardens and the "lawn" became a primary site for family interactions and an indicator of social standing. Men took great pride in their lawns and it was common to spend saturday mornings tending to the lawn and its edges. These domestic cultural practices spurned a new era for product design, manufacturing and marketing - and helped to reinvigorate the machine and metal fabrication industries that had grown to support the war effort.
The Ogden mower is also important in that it is a "transitional object". It's evolution is clearly visble in that it is essentially a common push mower that is given additional power from a small Villiers type two stroke internal combustion engine. This mower technology was rapidly replaced by propeller type lawn mowers that had no capacity to be used without the motor running. In this sense the Ogden mower is an important early , and short lived, example of a hybrid powered device, made redundant by a growing cultural obsession with convenience, automation and petrochemicals and with the financial capacity and social mandate to upgrade as a way of seeing in the boom years of the 1950's.