Hansa, not Hanse

At the end of last year, when I was preparing Valérie Braun's article for Dolls Houses Past and Present about Hanse and Lisa dolls houses from Denmark, I thought I'd seen another Hanse house on Australian ebay. I did a bit of googling, and found that the house I'd been thinking of was actually made by an Australian company called Hansa! I was able to buy one earlier this year, and here it is:

It's a quite simple 4-roomed dolls house for children, made of solid pine wood except for the back, which is hardboard. It's 51 cm (20") high to the peak of the roof, 63 cm (24.75") at its widest point (the eaves), and 20 cm (about 8") deep.

The main thing of interest to me is the printed paper backing showing details of each room.
Here's the kitchen, complete with mis-spelled dog bowl (it says DOGY, in case you can't see it):

The living room, which shows more details through the windows:

The scenery is not particularly Australian (unlike in another dolls house I picked up on the same trip to Sydney), although barbed wire fences can be found in many country areas in Australia.

 
The children's bedroom looks out onto more fencing extending over hills, with some sheep scattered around. Inside, there is wallpaper with pandas, and toys including a clown, a ball and a teddy bear.

The main bedroom has a similar rural scene outside, and inside, just a chair and chest of drawers with a mirror.

Thankfully, the maker's name is printed at the bottom of the living room wall:

Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have known that this dolls house was made in Australia (although perhaps the power points give a clue). I certainly wouldn't have known the maker. The Hansa company is still operating. It currently makes stuffed animals, with a special range of endangered animals. Their website says that the company was started in Melbourne in the early 1970s by Hans J Axthelm (so Hans A, I suppose). They began making plush toys in 1989. I'm not sure when this dolls house was made - hopefully, when I am able to look through more issues of the Australian toy trade journal, I will find it. I think it probably dates from the 1980s. I did find a Hansa toy garage in a late 70s / early 80s toy catalogue in the National Library:

Geoff Emerton Toyworld catalogue, Kingston ACT, late 70s, early 80s?

It looks like my house was varnished at home, rather than in the factory, as there were lots of hairs from the paintbrush stuck in the varnish!

Perhaps they were sold as raw pine, to be finished at home. There's another one for sale on ebay right now which has been painted in bright colours.

My dolls house came with dolls house furniture that I think is more recent - it's all wood, painted white with pink seats, knobs, etc. I think I'll look through my stash for furnishings that match the printed ones, perhaps blue and yellow in the kitchen and kids' bedroom, purple and pink in the main bedroom and living room - I'll see what I can find. It came with dolls, too - Fisher Price Loving Family parents, older girl, and many babies! I'm not sure if they'll stay. So - more on this house later on, when I've furnished it. Before that, I'll probably show you the other Australian-made timber dolls house I got on the same trip, which also has printed paper backing showing features of the rooms.

A set of homemade model buildings

This is not the house I referred to in my last post, but I just realised that I had photos on my camera of a house I picked up in Sydney in July! The house is now here, of course, but I haven't furnished it yet, so it is still worth showing these photos.

I bought the house, and the other buildings with it, on Australian ebay. I was particularly attracted to the garage, with its sloping roof, round windows and tapered, rounded screen at the entrance:


I was staying with my sister in July, and we drove to the Ikea Sydney store, where she wanted to buy some things, and I headed off up the winding way to Newport in Sydney's northern beaches area.

The seller's husband had found these toys while doing a house clearance, and the seller offered me other things from the same clearance. There were lots of plastic soldiers and camouflaged buildings and vehicles, which I left, but I did pick out the cars which you can see in the photo above, and a few other things. Then I drove in to Newport shopping centre, to get some more cash for the extra things I was buying - and found a German bakery! Bliss!

The little house seems designed to fit the plastic farm figures:


There are also some farm buildings, stables, perhaps a barn, what could be kennels:


I'm not actually sure what the building below was designed to be. It has lots of small windows on two levels, but no floor dividing the levels inside. From a distance, it could maybe be a school building - but maybe it was meant as a farm building?


The tiny covered wagon (above) is made from a matchbox, with a paper hood and cardboard wheels. It may have been part of the army equipment, or perhaps it went with the plastic cowboys and Indian figures which were also part of the lot.

There is some great fencing:


and I also bought some walls, which would have been used with the toy soldiers I think. In this photo, they are holding down one of the plastic bags which held the plastic figures:


This bag is not very exciting, but the fact that it has the measurements of the tissue paper in inches indicates that it dates from the mid 1970s at the latest. (Australia converted to metric measurements in about 1974. I was in primary school, and I remember learning to convert! I'm still better at thinking of some things in inches and feet, though.)

The other bag which was used to store the farm animals is more interesting, and it is clearly dated.



One side shows Bennelong Point, with Government House, in 1873. The other shows Bennelong Point in 1973 - it's where the Sydney Opera House now stands, and, as the bag also informs us, this was a souvenir from the Sydney Opera House. 1973 was the year the Opera House was opened, by the Queen, so this bag is probably one of the first souvenirs.

Probably these plastic figures were stored away sometime in the late 1970s. The buildings certainly seem to date from the 1960s, so I guess the children they were made for grew up and grew out of them. The buildings are all clearly homemade, and the figures were bought: the petrol pumps for the garage were made in Hong Kong, and the farm animals and people were too.

Among the other items from the house clearance was one in a box (it may have been a harmonica, I can't remember for sure now), with a scrap of paper with the name Milina on it. I looked this name up in the current Sydney telephone directory, and there are several people with the surname Milina listed in the northern beaches area of Sydney. Perhaps these model buildings were made by a Milina of an earlier generation for his (or her) children to play with.