The Jim’s Mowing Logo Is The Internet’s New Favourite Meme
"Jim's Jim's."
I was 11 years old when I moved to Australia.
All I remember about my first few months in this fair, sunburned country is: A) it was so hot that I passed out four times a day for the first week, B) fairy bread looked and tasted like a sweaty, smeary abomination, and C) there were so many Jim’s Mowing vans around the place that I assumed the bearded man painted on the side was the Prime Minister, and/or some kind of ‘Strayan deity.
Turns out, I wasn’t wrong about point C (or point B, for that matter; please do not @ me fairy bread lovers, or the National Dictionary.) The kindly, wise face of Jim’s Mowing is a fixture of this country’s cultural life, a kind of all-seeing, all-knowing antipodean God.
He is our Wendell Berry, a figure of beatific calm and bucolic poise who so happens to spend his free time writing books and papers about the maternal behaviour of rats and the rise and fall of human civilisations (but seriously).
Now, Jim from Jim’s Mowing has been honoured via the loftiest of internet plaudits: he has been aggressively memed.
here s a meme generator i made using the jim's mowing logo so if ur a fuckign idiot like me you can amuse yourself for 5 minutes https://t.co/D7cERQM6QO
— dogs wont save us from this hell (@sawngswjerkc) February 5, 2019
It all began when Jake Cleland, a legend of Australian music journalism and the creator of the beloved Strine Whine zine, developed a Jim’s Mowing Meme Generator.
“The genesis is a little murky but it was basically a joke between my friends Reahan and Josh and I about how the franchise had expanded into different professions,” Cleland explains.
Such power pic.twitter.com/zMbr4u0Dho
— Yosha Noesjirwan (@hozzaah) February 6, 2019
“Jim’s Mowing is probably the earliest brand I can remember. Probably that’s the case for a lot of people because the meme apparently resonated as a sort of cultural touchstone.
“So the original idea, I guess, was thinking about Jim’s as this sort of Umbrella Corp-ish maker and doer of everything. Now that I’ve forsaken music journalism to become a tech bro, making Jim’s into a meme template seemed like a valuable use of my engorging HECS debt.”
— GRYFF🍸1984 (@GryffSynth) February 6, 2019
Quickly, people began using the meme generator to reference everything from Jim’s famous beard (which, it should be noted, Jim himself no longer sports) to the cycles of online political discourse.
— mike “GDC” black (@kurtruslfanclub) February 5, 2019
The resulting memes have been surprisingly wholesome. “I was pretty worried folks would go hard on Jim and it’d get real ugly,” Cleland explains.
“Whoa, it totally didn’t! There were a couple that felt mean-spirited but mostly I was totally shocked at the ingenuity of some people within the boundaries of good taste.”
— Nebby Nebula (@Nebby_99) February 6, 2019
“I’m the kind of big loser who read No Logo during his abandoned advertising degree and leaned heavy into [Guy] Debord, and I’ve written a lot about memes, so to have a part in making one, even on a small scale, was pretty fulfilling,” Cleland continues.
“Besides the intellectual pretension though it’s just nice to have helped people have a good time. ”
Bless ya, Jim from Jim’s Mowing. Long may you run.
Lead Image: Twitter / @GryffSynth