Love from Darwin

Yes, I'm home again. It's been longer than it seemed while I was away - some time at Mum's place with my sister, some time there alone with Mum's cats, then time in Sydney with my sister - now I'm back in Darwin with my cats. After being very close to Mum all my life, and sharing many interests, it's taken time to come to terms with her death.

I'd forgotten how dry and hazy Darwin gets in the dry season (when rural property owners burn off, leading to smoky skies and ash particles in the air - and inside). I also hadn't realised how much I had bought on ebay while I was away! I have a small car, but absolutely filled it with all the parcels that had arrived since I left in April. The staff at Darwin GPO are wonderful, and had kept it all safely in one place ...

So I've spent a couple of days unpacking (and dealing with all the packaging!). One of my purchases is this wonderful set:


Actually, there are two armchairs, but they are quite big - about 12.5cm or 5" wide, deep and high - so I only put one in the photo with the sofa.

The "walls" are an old filing box and the flooring is an old piece of lino, both of which I found at an amazing secondhand shop in Annandale called Recycling Works:

photo from Google; not mine

I really could do with something to cover the metal that held the spring clip - maybe a lamp, like this one:


but I'd need to make it a stand, or hang it - not today, so only half a scene - but I wanted to show you this lounge suite, with a lovely message on the back of the sofa:

"With love from Darwin 1944"

I bought this from Queensland; it was described as a "salesman sample miniature Genoa lounge," and it might well be a miniature sample, but for the message on the back.

1944 was of course during World War II, and following the Japanese bombing raids on Darwin in 1942, many civilians had been evacuated, and there were army bases in and south of Darwin. I think that these pieces may have been made by a service man or woman based in Darwin, and sent as a gift to a child living, perhaps, in Queensland ... I'd love to know more of their history, but these words alone evoke a time and place and circumstances - these chairs have seen a lot.

Dolls House Eggs, Sunny Side Up!

I received my copy of The Doll Family (as blogged about by CallSmall and Diepuppenstubensammlerin) recently. It's great - I love its comments on the doll world!

Father Doll likes his eggs "sunny-side up." Mother makes them just right, never breaking the yolks. Of course, that's easy to do with doll-house eggs!

I collected up the eggs from my dolls houses. My dolls are not very well supplied with eggs! They have more cake and tea than eggs, poor things!


There are 1/16th scale eggs from the Swans' Deluxe Caroline's Home, and very large fried bacon, egg and tomatoes on toast (1 5/8" long) from the Californian bungalow style house.


The boiled eggs in eggcups and the eggs in a bowl (hugely different in scale - the eggs in the eggcups are almost an inch tall, compared to just over quarter of an inch for the eggs in the bowl!) are from the Triang 52. I haven't yet put the two fried eggs (1 1/2" long) in a house - I wonder which the lucky dolls will be? And I'd better add eggs to the dolls house shopping list!

Miniature Spirits

I recently collected up most of the alcohol in my dolls houses for a group shot, to contribute to an album in the Dolls Houses Past and Present photo gallery.


You've seen most of the pieces here in the houses and room boxes they belong to: the Bodensee, the VERO Rügen, the Lundby Gothenburg, PI Angus Shand's office, and the Californian Bungalow style house.


The Jack Daniels boxed set is new - I bought it for Tim, as he and Johnno had to play cards without anything to drink.

But it's not easy to see all the details in each room, so I think the idea of collecting similar pieces up and photographing them together, as Florine did with radios and TVs and diepuppenstubensammlerin did with computers, is great. I'll try to do more gradually.

My 1966 Scrap Album: Fashion Dolls etc

At my mother's house, in the bedroom I slept in when I was a teenager, I still have a cupboard with some of my things in it. Among them are several scrap books, and I realise I almost have enough scrap books to make a collection!



I have one my mother's mother made for me when I was very little - it has lots of pictures with texture, like embossed cards, cards with tinsel on them, or small pictures stuck on larger ones, so you can run your finger over them and feel them as well as see them.


I also have one I made myself when I was a bit older; one my father's mother's stepmother made (the 1905 Watson's Bay card which says The Pleasures of the Season attend thee was scanned from that); and as a family we have one of my mother's father's mother's scrap albums, with press cuttings (!!) and mementos of her time as a school student, a university student, and on the world tour where she met my great-grandfather.



The scrap book that the pictures I've scanned here come from, was made for me by my mother in 1966. We had been to England to visit her family, and shortly before we were due to leave, my mother fell down some steps in her sister's house (called Rosemary Cottage), holding my baby sister, and broke a toe.



So, my father flew back to Australia with my sister and me, while my mother travelled by ship, so her toe could heal in peace. During that voyage, Mum made this scrap book from an old Sydney telephone directory. (How did she come to have that, on a voyage back from England to Australia? And enough magazines to cut pictures out of? I don't know.)



The magazines she used were from 1964 and 1965. I don't collect fashion dolls myself - in fact, my sister and I only had one, for a short time, who stood in the middle of a record and twirled around. But I realised that there are quite a lot of photos of fashion dolls, and those of you who collect them might be interested to see them. Most likely the photos accompanied patterns for the clothes which the dolls are modelling.



I've also scanned a few other photos of kitchen utensils etc, to remind us of what was seen as desirable in those years!



Some of these I have seen in miniature (this goblet, for example) - but perhaps not as much stainless steel as a 1960s doll would like!


I have to admit too that I am not sure who all these dolls are. I think most are Barbie, but who are the others?

The Battlement House has arrived - now, where do I put it?

Today my newest dolls house arrived. It is huge - 3 feet wide and 3 1/2 feet tall! Each room is 17 1/2 inches wide, 17 1/2 inches tall, and 15 1/2 inches deep. So really this is 1/6th scale. I thought about where to put it before I bid on it, but now I am not sure.
It's an interesting mixture of styles, from the battlement on the roof, to the very ornate fireplaces in the two rooms on the right. This is the upper room, perhaps a living room or bedroom?


This is the lower right room, where the fireplace decoration includes sphynxes, mermaids and cupids, along with weeping women. Possibly either a dining room or living room?


I have never seen anything like these fireplaces, particularly this one - if anyone recognises them, or knows more about them, I would love to know! They are really the reason I bought this house.

The other two rooms, on the left, are very plain - the upper room has only a lampshade:


while the kitchen has a shelf running along the back wall:


I am not sure when this house was made. I suspect that the electric lights and wiring were added at some point - it is early, but the wiring seems clumsy. The style of the house and fireplaces suggests to me the very early 20th century, or possibly late 19th century (ca 1890-1915?). I did some research in digitised Australian newspapers, and found a story, printed in the Melbourne paper The Argus in 1924, about a man who in 1914:

"made a 2-story doll's house, 5ft. 4in. in height, lit by electricity, with "all modern conveniences," and set in a miniature landscape garden."

10 years later the original owner presented this dolls house to the children's ward of a hospital, hence the story in the paper.

So it is possible that my crenellated dolls house was made around this time, complete with electricity. I will try to discover when the light switches were made, which may also provide some clues.

It seems that large scale dolls houses were quite common at this period. Here is a photograph of another large dolls house, where the inhabitants can be seen sitting on the verandah:


They are a baby doll, a kewpie, and two teddy bears. Houses such as these clearly provided a home for the dolls (and bears) which little girls played with. I think my Leadlight House is probably also in this scale; like the house in this photograph, the woodwork is fairly rough, but it has very decorative features to delight a little girl.

I don't yet know who will live in my house, or how I will furnish and decorate it. I don't have a lot of furniture in this scale, so I'll see what looks good, and think about who might live in a house with battlements, sphynxes, mermaids and cupids!