The first toy soldiers in Ross McLean's collection were purchased by a real-life soldier - his grandfather.

McLean, who lives in Helensburgh, reckons he's got "hundreds" of detailed toy soldiers - made by the company William Britain. Many were handed down through his family, with the first bought about 100 years ago by his grandfather Jack, who fought in the Great War.

"He was in World War I and went to Gallipoli," McLean says.

"He was a marksman at one point and carried wounded around like Simpson. As a reminder of the friendships that he had established with the people in Egypt and later in France, he purchased toy soldiers."

So that's the "soldier" part, but McLean also had the "toy" part covered, due his is maternal grandfather, who sold them in a Sydney toy store.

"On mother's side, we've got her father Ernest," McLean says.

"He was a store owner in Mosman. He purchased Britain soldiers and other brands to sell in the store. My mother had him put some aside just in case she got married and had a son. So I have some of those."

Some of those - and others he later bought himself - form a display in the Museum of Sydney's Toys Through Time exhibition that opens on Saturday.

Some of those soldiers show the wear and tear of battle - after all, you can't really give a kid toy soldiers and not expect him to play with them.

"Some are in good condition and some are in terrible condition," he admits.

"There's a range of those on display. One regiment, there's only two of them that have survived the battles over time when originally there would have been half a dozen.

"The most common injuries are that the paint wears off or you have amputees. Most often they'll lose an arm. So we've got a couple of amputees on display."

While his parents allowed him to play with them, there were definitely "outside toys" and "inside toys".

Most of the soldier were outside, but the royal carriage the company made was most definitely an inside toy.

"There were certain rules laid down about which ones could go where, and when I could play with them," McLean says.

"And who else I could play with them as well - which of the neighbours were careful enough not to damage them.

"I played soldier wars with my neighbour's kids. We would line them up in a battle line and fire matches like a cannon. If the match hit one of them, he had to fall down. It didn't really damage the soldiers.

"Eventually as I matured, the role that they performed matured."

These days, the soldiers are often used as a backdrop for McLean's model train sets. And they're pretty big train sets - he bought a property in Helensburgh so he could build a big shed out the back for the train setup.

While that's being built, the soldiers are hiding away in storage. Which is part of the reason he likes taking part in Toys Through Time - because he can bring them out and play with them.

"Seriously, that's what you're doing," he says.

"You're playing with them. We have guys who say they operate model railways but there's a lot of us who prefer to say 'Oh, we're playing trains'."

There are also some toys from Nowra featured in the Toys Through Time exhibition.

The rarely seen toys were owned by June Wallace, who moved to a cottage behind the historic Meroogal house with her mother in 1920.

Bob Whight, project manager for Toys Through Time, said the items are usually in storage at Meroogal so this is one of the rare times they're on display.

"We've got a collection of her toys from her childhood on display, which includes some tiny dolls in hand-knitted and crocheted dresses," Whight says.

"They're so small they fit inside a glasses case.

"There's a tea set, which is a vibrant yellow colour, as well as records from her lullaby collection - her uncle gave the family a record player in the '20s.

"It's a really sweet collection of some very petite toys that belonged to a little girl who grew up in Nowra."

Whight said the idea for the exhibition came from an earlier project looking at childhood in Australia. They found by using toys as part of the exhibition, they formed immediate connections with people.

"The thing that seemed to have the most resonance with people were toys," Whight says.

"It was through that process of trying to tell the story of childhood that we came to realise the story of toys and what they can actually tell us about childhood and about ourselves today.

"That's something that seems that people can relate to much more.

"What we found with toys is there seems to be an ongoing fascination, the nostalgia trip for people. So when you start looking at toys, it's got this immediacy that can take you back to a certain place in time.

"That seems to be a much stronger trigger than other things that we might have from our childhood."

The aim of the exhibition, which is arranged chronologically from the early 1800s to the 1970s, is to be "light-hearted and fun" rather than academic. But Whight said it was more than a "I had that toy as a kid" walk down memory lane; the toys also tell stories about us.

"We found toys are a really great way to uncover different stories about our city - the people who have lived here, the shops that used to sell the toys, the manufacturers who used to make them," Whight says.

"That was really what we're using the toys as, the storytellers that can tell us all different aspects of the story of ourselves."

There's a wide range of toys in the exhibition - a pull-along wooden deer owned by the children of John and Elizabeth McArthur, Barbie dolls and clothing, pedal cars, rocking horses and tin rocket ships.

There's even a collection of those plastic toys that came in cereal packets in the 1970s, from journalist Barry Divola.

A collector of Crater Critters, Divola even wrote a book about his quest to find them - Searching For Kingly Critter.

"Like a lot of people, he'd thrown out the collection he had as a kid," Whight says.

"Then he rediscovered a passion for them as an adult and set out systematically trying to collect them all."

Whight says some adult toy collectors had held on to toys they had as a child and later decided to expand their collection. Others, however, can be driven to collect toys they weren't able to have as a kid.

"We've got a beautifully restored pedal car in the exhibition, and the owner had never actually had any pedal cars as a child," Whight said.

"As an adult he was travelling overseas and he went to a pedal car meet, saw them and got really excited. He has since set about collecting and restoring them."

As for the most unusual toys in the exhibition, Whight nominates those where the child looks at a spinning image through a small gap, seeing what looked like an animated short.

In it's time, Whight says, it was very cutting-edge. "They date from the 1860s to the end of the 1800s," she says.

"They're precursors to cinema and animation. They really developed out of scientific investigation of sight and persistence of vision.

"That's something that would be considered unusual today.

You don't usually see those sorts of things around."