The collection
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In 2015 I was giving my brother a tour of our new house in the Blue Mountains in NSW. We stopped by my children's rumpus room and my eagle-eyed brother spotted a box of Lego poking through the chaos... and the rest, as they say, is history....
The box of Lego poking through the chaos in the kid's toy room.
Let's start at the beginning.
Way back in the 1970s and 1980s in suburban Perth, Western Australia, my brother, sister and I were mad about Lego. Raised in a house where toys were seen as a learning opportunity by our parents, Lego was an obvious choice. Lego was (and still is) a tool that allowed us to explore our creativity. Anything we could imagine, we'd have a go at building it.
So many weekends were spent creating cities, cars, buildings, kitchens, space ships, dragons, dinosaurs - all to be chucked back in the Lego tub at the end of the day, ready for another day.
In the late 1980s when we were "too cool for school" and Lego took a back seat to movies, hanging out with friends and driving cars around the neighbourhood, our next door neighbour – knowing we loved Lego – gifted us 2 boxes of Lego. All the family remember this Lego gift and even during my teenage haze I still remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time. It was older than the 1970s and 1980s Lego we had in our collection and contained items we had never seen before.
The next 3 decades is a sad tale of "a toy in a cupboard"; unused and unappreciated for many, many years. Knowing how expensive Lego was, my father and mother safely stored our 1970s and 1980s Lego – along with this gifted 1960s Lego – for over 30 years.
Eventually, time passed and as parents do, they downsized their house and passed the Lego on to me to store - maybe one day the next generation will want to play with it.
So where does that night in my rumpus room fit in? Thanks to my brother's keen eye we had found something special, something worth investigating in those forgotten boxes from so many moons ago.
Hundreds of blocks and plates in red, blue, white and transparent colours.
The previous owners had taken special care to box up special pieces like windows, roof tiles and named bricks.
As we opened box after box we discovered such wonderful treasures - some we recognised - some we would clearly need to put in some time to research how they fit in to Lego history.
We recognised the trees from our late 1970s Lego set but what are those cars doing there - Lego don't make toy cars... do they?
So where to from here? What did we have in the collection and how did it fit into the Lego timeline? Read on and join us as we learned more about our treasure trove of Lego – and what we plan to do with it.
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