One thing to keep in mind, especially this late in the day, are travelling ponies.
Ponies that came with families who moved into country, and also ponies that have gone back and forth across the border in online collecting over several years. If you built a list from UK ebay of ponies sold in the UK you'd get a very warped list of pony availability because so many ponies have shifted over borders in the last 20 years. The same is true for US ebay.
Not that that's a bad thing for you if it improves your availability, but it may or may not determine what was officially sold in Australia.
Maybe it would be helpful to find some old catalogs? (I'm sure that isn't 100% but it could be useful)
20+ years of online trading does skew things. (Which doesn't account for 30+ years of people traveling w ponies)
It would be genuinely awesome if someone did the legwork and put together a definitive list of Aussie releases (and perhaps NZ ones as well) as it's one of those gaps...
the alt birthflowers got released thereYeah, those have been confirmed to be released here but I've only stumbled upon 1 Alt birth flower pony online.
I am 90% sure the year 8 taf babies where all hong kong releases.
I also feel the uk family ponies got released there, the did in NZ (berrytown etc)
Some Scandinavian ponies also got released in au, yellow moondancer, gusty and co. Not sure about Nss truly and cupcake
It would be genuinely awesome if someone did the legwork and put together a definitive list of Aussie releases (and perhaps NZ ones as well) as it's one of those gaps...
I'm hoping to achieve that, although it'll probably be speculative for a long time. I'll try to find old employees, find vintage catalouges, go to the state library and that kind of stuff.
It would be genuinely awesome if someone did the legwork and put together a definitive list of Aussie releases (and perhaps NZ ones as well) as it's one of those gaps...
I'm hoping to achieve that, although it'll probably be speculative for a long time. I'll try to find old employees, find vintage catalouges, go to the state library and that kind of stuff.
Speaking just from the position of someone who's been working on the UK line for about 20 years and where there are still gaps and things we can't explain due to lack of evidence, you have my sympathy :D But I absolutely support you trying to get what you can together. If it's any help, one of the first international trades I did in the late 1990s was for 3 Dream Beauties from Australia - Morning Glory, Crystalline and Dream Gleamer. Because it was so early in online trading terms, I wonder if that indicates DBs happened in Aus.
The information I put together for the UK comes partly from stuff I still had from my childhood, partly from inserts, partly from a list Hasbro UK sent to me in 1995 (before their customer service became autobot annoying as it is today), partly from old catalogue scans from things like Argos, partly from the memories and bits and pieces of other collectors, partly from the comics...and so on.
In short, there are lots of potential avenues for investigation.
The challenge I think you may have is that I think most of Aus's pony line was through import of either US or UK packaged items, which means your inserts may not help you determine what was sold there.
It is probably a hard task but please don't give up on it :) I feel like there are a lot of different pony release combinations around the world but most sites only focus on the US vs other. I work with the UK and try to bring some Euro stuff into it, but it really needs people in those countries to put stuff together as well.
Found a huge lot of G1 MLP on eBay, although I can't buy it.
The only pony I ever found while living in Australia was Hopscotch. She was in a thrift store by herself.
The only pony I ever found while living in Australia was Hopscotch. She was in a thrift store by herself.
The only pony I ever found while living in Australia was Hopscotch. She was in a thrift store by herself.
LOL! When I found her I did give her a serious side-eye like, "What are you doing here? Are you supposed to be here?"
The only pony I ever found while living in Australia was Hopscotch. She was in a thrift store by herself.
LOL! When I found her I did give her a serious side-eye like, "What are you doing here? Are you supposed to be here?"
Expat pony! A lot of Britons seem to like emigrating over there ;)
Surprisingly, most ponies traditionally thought of as being UK exclusives were released in Australia. We didn’t get Mountain Boys but a huge number of other ponies were also sold here. Hopscotch, Snowflake, Baby Billie/Katie/Susie all show up somewhat commonly. We had our own version of the Activity Club which released the same ponies and TAF babies were available somehow, though I can’t confirm if it was a mail in offer or not. A collector wrote to Hasbro about two decades ago now and got a full MIP set directly, long after they were released.
I know people who remember seeing various UK ponies and the kitchen playset in store so it’s not a case of immigrating with them. Especially when you consider how expensive immigrating to Australia was at that time. Most families wouldn’t be packing a great deal of toys for their children and would be opting to rebuy them over giving up precious shipping container space.
The most common ponies however are the three newborns Baby Sunset, etc. These were sold in Easter egg packaging and several Aussie collectors remember them but no photo evidence has ever appeared.
the alt birthflowers got released there
It's a long time ago now, and I may be wrong, but I believe the information came from someone in Aus that they had been sold there.
But without a paper trail it's open to being debunked as a theory. It's also possible that it was a regional store or even an independant store that imported them, rather than Hasbro across the whole country. I know a couple of people who had SS ponies new here from that kind of store in the south west, but they weren't sold here formally.
The problem with AUS is that nobody really documented stuff over there at the point MLP finished...so figuring out stuff like that is going to be tough :/
Hello! Chiming in quickly to answer an earlier question: Dream Beauties were 100% sold in Australia - I got Sheertrimmer for my fourth birthday :) obviously can’t tell you which ranges exactly, but they were definitely there.
The other thing I can tell you definitively - since as I have mentioned before many of my ponies were inherited from my older sister, and my South African grandmother in Johannesburg would often buy me ponies, so sometimes I am a little unsure about the EXACT provenance of everything in my childhood collection - is that I have a distinct memory of going to Toys r Us and buying Petite Ponies there. I had a set from almost every collection and many of my friends did too, as well as playsets. They were very popular.