A lot has changed over decades when it comes to children's toys. But a lot has remained the same.

Growing up on their parents' sprawling pastoral property near Goulburn, Susan and Andrew Gibson were surrounded by gardens, waterways, horses and pets. The pair were immersed in outdoor life, hiding, exploring, taking canoes onto the pond at the bottom of the garden and riding horses.

But they were also the children of a wealthy family - the extended Gibson clan - and this meant one thing in particular: toys. They had piles and piles of toys, costumes and playthings to extend their imaginative life. Susan loved her dozens of dolls, and made clothes for them herself on a sewing machine. Andrew played with toy soldiers inside a tin fort and moved figurines around imaginary battlegrounds.

Today, around 350 of the Gibson kids' toys - many in mint condition - are in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. From a horse tricycle to 60 dolls, boats, planes, figurines, and a spectacular bespoke doll's house, the toys are poignant, filled with the marks of a different time.

They also speak to a privileged childhood that was largely insulated from the Great Depression that was ravaging many parts of the country.

Down in north-eastern Victoria in about 1939, nine-year-old Diana Bates and her older brother Terry were having a very different childhood. Growing up impoverished on a poultry farm in Christmas Hills, times were tough and they, along with many kids around them, worked hard on the farm after school finished each day.

And in the evenings, under the light of a kerosene lamp, Diana painted figures on old coins using household paints, and the pair would push them across the table, acting out lives of drama and intrigue. The tiny figures she painted were startlingly detailed and often glamorous - priestesses and royals and exotic ladies.

A large selection of these painted coins, as well as the tiny decorated matchboxes they were stored in, are also part of the museum's collection. It was her daughter, Andrea, who donated them. She remembers her mother bringing them out of storage and talking about a childhood that was, in fact, quite a traumatic one. But being able to handle the coins again, and remember what it felt like to escape the hardship of daily life into an exciting and glamorous world of make-believe, had brought a sense of catharsis.

A couple of decades after Diana and Terry were making do with their coins, in urban 1950s Sydney, a very different family had games of their own.

Andrew Lindsay's imaginative world was filled with cowboys and cap guns. Growing up in a literal toy factory, the family motto was "dress up and play the Lindsay way". This meant putting on costumes, "going bush" near the family home, and staging mock battles for hours on end.

Lindsay's Leichhardt, the Australian toy manufacturer, had been founded in the 1930s, and is still manufacturing toys today. The company had begun with making shoe cleaner and feather dusters, and using the leftover turkey feathers to make "American Indian" headdresses. These took off, and by the mid-1930s, the company was producing classic Cowboy and Indian costumes and calico tents.

In the 1940s, the Lindsays began trading on television westerns like Annie Oakley and Bonanza, producing costumes under license from Walt Disney and Warner Brothers, continuing well into the 1950s with the introduction of television in Australian homes.

A selection of these costumes, including a full cowgirl costume complete with a fringed vest, have also made their way into the national collection, thanks to the foresight of Andrew Lindsay, who realised, in adulthood, perusing the family collection in preparation for moving the factory to smaller premises, that there were endless stories contained in the costumes.

"Walking around, I was struck by what I felt was the cultural significance of a lot of this stuff, that there was a whole history of Australia in the toys that the children are playing with, and that told us so much about who we were and who we are," he says.

And he's right.

Wandering around a fluorescent-lit room at the National Museum of Australia's repository in the outer Canberra suburbs, the atmosphere shouldn't be conducive to sentimentality or poignancy. But seeing the vintage cowboy costumes, still in their original packaging, alongside Susan Gibson's spectacular bespoke art deco dolls house, and Diana Bates' painted coins, it's striking how much of the childhood spirit imbues the room.

Nestled in tissue paper, a threadbare toy koala, once owned and adored by Nola Firth (now a Greens candidate for the Tweed Shire Council) has the scent of childhood. Nearby is a striking set of wire-and-cloth bush toys made by Indigenous children between 1997 and 1999, inspired by working life on outback cattle stations.

Some of the cowboys on horses were made by Tristan Young, a 10-year-old Eastern Arrernte boy who lived in Ltyentye Apurte in the Northern Territory.

The most contemporary items in the museum's vast collection of Australian toys, they're both lovingly preserved and practically galloping off the table. In this sense, they're not so different from the painted coins, or even the rocking horse tricycle.

Museum curator Laura Cook, who's developing a new exhibition of toys set to open later this month, says the collections reveal how children have played at different times and in different circumstances of privilege, deprivation, or outback living.

"I think toys are how children learn and how children play and how children understand their world, so that's a huge part of our social history," she says.

And, as many of the items show, not much has changed fundamentally about how children create worlds in their imaginations, either through dolls and costumes, or discarded items like old coins and pieces of cloth.

"I sort of set out with the question, how has it changed? And I think the answer is that it hasn't really changed very much," Cook says.

"You can never see inside the mind, the imaginary world of another person. But these objects - and I chose them because there are other supporting pieces of evidence, whether that's photographs, or first person quotes, or third party observations - they give us a glimpse into these rich and immersive imaginary worlds of a child, that we all find quite familiar from our childhood."

For Andrew Lindsay, that world has never quite disappeared. He doesn't want to glamorise life in a factory - he spent much of his teenage years working on the floor, lifting heavy stock and watching the clock. But even in those interminable hours, he says he never lost sight of what the business was all about.

"I was also still really alive in the light of the imagination, and that marvellous thing of creative play that children do so well," he says.

"One of the roles of the family business was just to help children inhabit their creative life more fully."

Lindsay grew up and away from the family business, and into drama and writing. He's written a couple of novels, studied at a clown school in Paris, and now teaches acting classes. He likes to encourage his students to tap into their inner child.

"It's the life of the body that helps us discover what we love in the world, and play is very important," he says.

"The spirit of the family business is still very much alive in me - I have no intention of stopping any time soon."

To mark the opening of its new immersive play space later this year, the museum will be displaying many of the toys in its collection for the first time.

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