I keep saying, English and water are incompatible concepts.
We probably each have an individual view on a lot of the factors in mower sales from the 1960s to say 2000. Until the 1970s the federal government pretty much made imports from anywhere but Britain impractical, so the bulk of the sales fell to local manufacturers, given the quality of British electricals. (Not that local electricals could match American ones, though.)
Victa had a pretty rough start, making lawnmowers in the 1950s that were so awful that the British ones were better. However they overcame that by the very early 1960s and were making crude but effective mowers that didn't require a lot of maintenance if you could keep the supply of spark plugs and fuel up to them (they used an inordinate amount of both). Other Australian brands had become invisible by 1970, at least to me, though by 1980 Scott Bonnar had become a respectable brand of over-priced but quite adequate reel mowers for private owners, ATCO having disappeared from the Australian market by then on account of outlandish prices and maintenance requirements.
What really changed between the mid-1970s and say about 1980 is that Briggs and Stratton engines became available and financially accessible, spelling the doom of the 2 stroke mower in this market. Victa tried to resist that process in order to protect their sales of their own 2 strokes, by pricing the Briggs models higher than the 2 strokes. That effectively created opportunities both for Rover and for imported mowers: Victa put itself in a position of being a 2 stroke specialist at a time when the market no longer wanted 2 strokes. Victa's stranglehold was broken by this piece of corporate ineptitude. That gave them a shrinking market share, right when the long drought decimated lawnmower sales for close to ten years. As a result Victa was unable to show decent financial performance as a company. They were by then owned by an investor company, which could not see any real upside to retaining ownership: Victa appeared to have no growth opportunities even if they waited until the drought was over. So, the Victa company was sold to Briggs, Briggs moved production other than final assembly to China, and the rest is history.
So far as Scott Bonnar is concerned, from the early 1960s until about 1980 it was very difficult to compete with Victa in rotary mowers, but the (admittedly small) reel mower market was wide open. I think SB didn't really try all that hard in the rotary segment, coming up with a product that was a sort of anti-Victa. Victa's mowers were as crude as a cast iron ingot, but about as tough and reliable as one. SB came up with something that looked better but didn't work better, and they did not have the distribution or brand name to get anywhere in the market. They also did not have Victa's volume which supported Victa's rapid model changes leading to their mowers becoming fashion statements, like new cars. I find it remarkable that SB would try to break into the rotary mower business by making their main feature an English ignition system. That is about as smart as making the main feature of a new brand of car, a broken spring in the driver's seat sticking up about 4".
