BBQ

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 manufacture 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; 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 (Gregg’s) slowed down 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 loose-as that evening and we could stay up to at least midnight playing a game called “Get Off My Proprertee”

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.

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

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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 European Howick, Auckland, we were always excited by Western architectural trends, including the Tudor Style, and the work of Palladio.

These types of houses were everywhere; Northpark was growing and the huge Doric columns signaled a new wealth. If you lived in a faux Tudor-Stewart house, you were king of balls.

Meanwhile Dad recycled bricks to build one of his epic barbeques.

It would have a chimney. It would have the bits out to the sides that geezers put meat on before they cooked or they can rest the metal spatula that we made for them in metalwork.

Dad would not wear a silly apron with all the shellfish in New Zealand on it unless someone made him. But he would do it if pressured by his own age group.

We would burn those carbonettes and the smokes would blacken the afternoon skies.