Luke Jones carefully unfolds the bubble wrap to reveal a little toy truck.

It's tinplate. About 30 centimetres long. Circa 1930. Made by Melbourne manufacturer Leckie and Gray.

The paint is worn in parts and there are a few little scratches along the side.

"They were made to be played with," Jones says.

Not anymore. Not these ones.

The truck is carefully wrapped up and put back into a small suitcase alongside a handful of other vintage Australian toys Jones has brought along to show.

Luke Jones is drawn to the beauty of Australian toys. ( ABC News: Patrick Wood )

His collection of more than 500 toys is his life's work — worth "lots and lots", he says rather coyly — and to him they are no mere playthings.

They're a window into Australia's past that reflect a nation finding a new confidence in the years after the Great War.

A chance visit from Italy

Some of Jones's earliest memories involve collecting stamps, coins and feathers.

When he turned nine, his parents allowed him to get a job as a paperboy delivering The News tabloid around his north Adelaide home, and he knew then the money would go towards a collection of some sort.

A fortuitous visit from a family friend from Italy, who told him the Europeans were fond of a collectable toy, set him on his course.

Jones began trawling the local antique shops and auctions, and he meticulously wrote down the details of his purchases. It's a practice he continues to this day.

Early entries to Luke Jones's diary reveal how seriously he took the task. ( Supplied )

"Grey, wooden balancing horse with yellow saddle (weights missing, to be fixed). Price: $5. Place: Hobans, Port Road."

That entry was in 1985, when Jones was 11, and it was one of two purchases he made that day. It must have been a busy afternoon, because the other toy was a tinplate truck from a store on the other side of the city.

The tin truck, likely made by Leckie and Gray, and the mysterious horse. ( Supplied )

Initially Jones's collection was scattershot and just reflected the toys he liked. But by his early 20s he had decided on a structure: mass-manufactured Australian toys made between 1900 and 1965.

What he had previously thought of as crude and unrefined he now appreciated as distinct and reflective of Australia.

"You can see waves of what you'd call confidence about what Australia is and what Australia's got to offer," he said.

"There was a period of pretty unimaginative copying of prototypes from Europe at the beginning of manufacture.

"We're talking about early 1920s, post-World War I when manufacturing was starting to take off."

But then a shift came as the 1930s rolled around and, in Jones's estimation, manufacturers became more established and Australians settled into themselves.

One tea set, in particular, tells this story.

An iconic Australian set? Made by Leckie and Gray, circa 1930s. ( Supplied )

"That tea set is an amazing Australian toy. So authentically Australian," he said.

"All of these Australian animals playing sports and Australian football being played by a kangaroo on a tea cup.

"It's not imitating an English or German precedent. It's confidently Australian and it's very special.

"I find that enormously appealing, and in terms of my work structuring a collection of Australian manufactured items, that's just what I want to see."

The capitalist imperative

It would be easy to mistake Jones's collection for nostalgia.

At first blush it fits the sentiment often expressed for a simpler, more honest time when kids could be kids and didn't stare at screens.

But that's not really it.

The maker of this tinplate and wood set, circa 1940s, remains unknown. ( Supplied )

Jones is an architect by trade and is drawn to the aesthetic appeal of the toys, which for the most part remain on display in a special part of his home.

"The key for me as a collector is [that each piece is] visually beautiful," he said.

"Even though I understand that they were made to be played with, that they had that imagination and stimulated children, to me they're objects on a shelf that I like looking at."

And Jones is under no illusions about their origins. In many cases, they were purely marketing ploys designed to sell products.

Life Savers brought out a range of trucks. Coca-Cola, too. Minties did planes.

Holden was so fanatical about its toy cars you couldn't create one, much less sell it, without explicit permission from General Motors.

Minties also rode the commercial wave with this 1930s Leckie and Gray set. ( Supplied )

We might think of toys these days as little more than merchandise for Disney or the latest Pixar kids' flick, but this is hardly a modern phenomenon.

"In some ways nothing changes," Jones surmises.

Yet some change was inevitable

The golden era, as Jones calls it, couldn't last.

Through the 1960s, tariff policy and import restrictions eased and soon Australia was open for business.

German and Japanese manufacturers were sending toys over and Australians kids lapped them up.

"By the mid-1960s the pressures on Australian manufacturing were too great," Jones said.

"It was unsustainable for Australian companies to be making and trying to sell these toys with the pressures of high quality, cheap imports."

Jones now has his own kids — a three-year-old son and seven-month-old daughter — and he's conscious of what he buys for them.

Would this 1930s tinplate Leckie and Gray tambourine be a hit today? ( Supplied )

"To some extent I pay zero attention to the mass-produced plastic items. They just hold no interest for me," he said.

These days it's actually the toys that are made on a smaller scale and generally sold at markets that catch his eye. It's a contradiction to his collection, Jones admits, but they are at least locally made.

"You can get amazing craft-made children's toys made out of red gum and all this sort of thing by Australian manufacturers ... really impressive," he said.

As for whether his son is allowed to play with his collection, and maybe his daughter when she grows up?

"[They] can play with the more robust ones from time to time … supervised play."

Luke Jones's collection has been detailed in a new book, Australian Toys: A Collection.