BBQ fires: walk with me

From the archives...

When I was growing up, barbeques were slowly coming into vogue in Aotearoa, but they were often from the local hardware stores and were a scrawny tripod affair with a flimsy cowl that sheltered the Hellaby’s sausages from an Auckland breeze.

Dad’s choice of fuel was carbonettes, with a light soaking of kerosene. I reckon the use of carbonettes is probably the key cause of climate change.

It was both magical and nerve-wracking to see the assemblage engulfed in a fireball but Dad wasn’t bothered. He could do it all one-handed…

The food tasted amazing; it was perfectly carcinogenic, blackened, crispy and the tomato sauce extinguished the steaming interior of the sausage, which lay nestled in a slice of Tiptop Sandwich cut and a slather of marg.

But oh boy we couldn’t get enough, because BBQ night meant that the parents were going to get litty that evening and we could stay up to at least midnight playing a game called “Get Off My Proprerdee” (get off my property - with a southern accent).

The eldest teen next door, Tony, would adopt the persona of an angry redneck and chase us around. All us kids joined in running for their lives away from this cutlery knife-wielding psychopath.

The next day he would talk to us over the fence and share peaches from his parents’ tree, then go to his job like a normal person.

Mum and dad gave Tony’s parents the nicknames of “Steady Eddy and Maid Marion”. Eddy and Marion were partiers and huge drinkers, a bit like the Howick version of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The main difference was that there wasn’t much cocaine or prescription stuff going down when they partied; it was all Joe Dolce numbers sung in an Italian accent, washed down with a cask or two of Cook’s Chasseur.

One morning we found the 7” of Shaddup You Face on our berm. One year the neighbourly conviviality levelled up.

Where are these vineyards? Take me to these vineyards.

After that my dad’s barbequing went to new heights when brickwork became fashionable. Not to say brick chimneys were this new thing in civilization but in that cultural outpost of Howick, we were always excited by Western architectural trends, including the Tudor Style and the work of Palladio, but also the great roadworks and chimneys of the world, the roundabout at Botany and Union Road as one example, and the ancient chimneys on school trips to Howick Historical Village to name two.

Meanwhile Dad recycled bricks from a former bbq iteration to build one of his epic barbeques.

It would have a large chimney. It would be lit up with carbonettes and turps and the smokes would blacken the afternoon skies.

It was a time where fire had been harnessed by mankind, but not quite. It burnt at its own pace and height, singeing meats however it wanted. It was a suburban smoke-signal to the neighbourhood kids to come and spend another night listening to Richard and Elizabeth yelling then making up to Brotherhood of Man and Mary Hopkins numbers; the kids while munching on a decently carcinogenic sausage and waiting for “Psycho”

Tony to appear.

Great BBQs of the Western World being built