1953 - Spacemen by Poplar Plastics

[ANZinSpace]

I found the following article from November 1953 which shows two of the Poplar plastics spacemen and what is probably the Australian copy of a Gilmark spaceship.

 

[Brian..]

Thanks, ANZ. For a researcher of Australian toys, the sentence about the easing of import restrictions is the key one.

[ANZinSpace]

Yes the import restriction is interesting and combined with the population we had at the time (5-6 million people) explains why Australian manufacturers imported molds to make toys and why overseas companies set up local manufacturing facilities or bought existing ones.

I did a bit more of a check on import restrictions and apparently the Government restricted imports into the country in March 1952 in order to improve it's budget and balance of payments. It apparently worked because in April 1953 they announced an easing of the restrictions. A number of toy adverts during this period state they've got some toys in but can't guarantee if they'll get any more later on and one even stated that they hadn't had imports for at least 14 months. Apparently toys and other other goods were in category B which were restricted to 30% of Base imports (not sure what they mean by Base imports) and the restriction was lifted to 40%. On top of this there was a sales tax on toys of 33 1/3 percent so not only were imported toys hard to get hold of they were expensive as well.