Greg Dixon
A little-known local book lifts the lid on the exciting history of ride-on mowing.
The rumours are true. On April 1, I joined that elite group of New Zealanders who have done more than 100 hours on a ride-on mower.
It’s taken less than a year to achieve this milestone – we’ve got a whole lot of lawn, you understand. Still, it makes me swell with pride to have become part of this country’s illustrious mowing history.
I know it’s illustrious, because while in a local second-hand bookshop looking for a guide to the trapping and butchering of evil hens, I came across Cut Above: The Ride-on Mower in Maoriland by Murray Molander, a retired farmer from the tiny little-heard-from King Country town of Whakanauwheri.
Published in 1985, the late Molander’s closely clipped history – it’s just 38 pages, a dozen of which are evocative colour plates – is a somewhat dated but fantastically lively telling of the story of ride-ons in New Zealand. So lively, in fact, it reads like a work of fiction.
In his introduction, Molander explains that this is because there has been a concerted international cover-up of New Zealand’s contribution to ride-on mowing’s rich history and that he, as a proud mower himself, felt it was his duty to, as it were, sort the grass from the clippings.
Still, his tiny tome has a catcherful of controversial claims, foremost that the first ride-on was built right here in New Zealand. Most accounts of mowing’s history credit JP Engineering of Leicester, England, with creating the first ride-on mower, shortly after World War I. These chain-driven monsters were towed behind horses and for the first time allowed the operator to ride on the machine itself. They were heady times, I’m sure.
However, Molander exposes the British invention “myth” with his discovery that our very own Richard Pearse had achieved “semi-controlled mowing” nearly 15 years earlier. In 1904, the inventive Pearse managed to “mow” for nearly 50m using a team of five romney sheep, a bath chair and a propeller left over from his abortive attempt at powered flight the previous year. It ended badly when the luckless cocky lost control of the romneys before crashing – into the same gorse fence he’d ploughed his aeroplane into the year before.
It was an inauspicious start for the machines in New Zealand. Which is perhaps why 50 years passed before Pearse’s plucky No 8 wire idea was picked up by the Mower Lines company, which in 1966 developed and built New Zealand’s first and only homegrown ride-on mower.
Called, rather amusingly, the “Moa”, its production was short-lived: a mere 10 years. It seems that by the late 1960s, cheaper foreign ride-on mowers had begun flooding the local market, so the Moa’s extinction was sadly inevitable.
Still, the growing availability of modestly priced machines led to the nearly forgotten synchronised-mowing craze of the early 1970s.
So popular a pastime did this become that the newly formed Ride-on Mowers Association of New Zealand – or Romanz – attempted having synchronised mowing accepted as a sport in time for the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch. The idea, in Molander’s memorable phrase, was quietly “put out to pasture with extreme prejudice” after Romanz was found to be a dodgy front operation for the struggling Mower Lines.
However, it’s what occurred on September 12, 1981, that rates as the author’s most shocking claim: Molander alleges the third and final test of the 1981 Springbok tour was very nearly cancelled in the second half thanks to an irate Eden Park groundsman and his ride-on. Incensed by the tour and angry at the treatment of his footy paddock, the groundsman, one Moe Power, told workmates he was going to “mow down” the players in revenge.
It was only the more famous, and for Moe rather ill-timed, dropping of flour bombs on the park from a Cessna plane that snuffed out his act of terrorism.
As the groundsman, astride his ride-on, drove onto the field, one of the bombs, well, floured Power before he could do any damage. As Molander would say, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
Richard Pearse mowed for nearly 50m using a team of five romney sheep, a bath chair and a propeller.