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Where the house was humble, the barbeque was magnificent, a giant edifice of brick, broken glass and beer cans set in concrete and terracotta piping, with terrazzo slabs for meat and salads and drinks and whatever else needed somewhere to rest. It stood three metres high and at least as long. At its centre was a wood-fired grill, but the barbeque encompassed many more functions than that of simply grilling meat, encompassed functions of a diverse culinary, spiritual and historical nature. It drew upon the old Australia Harry had grown up in and the old Europe Sonja had grown up in, combining something of the elements of the bush building with southern European shrines and gravestones. Sitting out to one side at head height was an old clothes dryer, repainted in sky-blue, gutted of its innards and now used as a dry-smoking cupboard, connected by galvanised piping to an old-firebox at the base of the barbeque. Into the firebox would be placed she-oak or myrtle and a slow fire started, while in the smoker dryer would be placed kangaroo and trout and salmon and trevally and trumpeter and eels and wallaby and pork salamis, and out would emerge the most delectable smoked meats. Hanging from hooks screwed into the barbeque's rear wall at different levels were green and pink plastic Décor pots in which red flowering geraniums and pink flowering pelargoniums and cacti of all colours flourished and hung in festoons. At the heart of the barbeque, immediately below the grill, was an oven formed out of a kerosene tin set in adobe. Beneath the dry mud-insulated oven was an alcove, replete with ducting for the smoke, in which a fire would be built to heat the oven from which emerged Harry's bread, large round loaves broader than a man's chest, made in the same manner he had learnt from Boy all those years ago. Next to the oven was a smaller alcove lined with green cider bottles laid sideways, in which Harry put his dough to rise and Sonja left her pots of milk to sour into yoghurt. Set into the brickwork behind the grill were the purple pearly abalone shells gathered by Harry in his years as a fisherman's deckhand, the work which he had taken up upon returning to Australia. The shells were arranged in a circle, in the middle of which were two three-inch nails driven into the mortar. Hanging from one nail was a pair of barbeque tongs and from the other a sea eagle's skill that Harry had found many years before, small and delicately shaped. The various ducts rose to the top of the barbeque, where their smokey breath was released into broken terracotta pipes that ascended the rear wall at various heights, giving the barbeque the appearance of some crazed Baroque premonition of a Wurlitzer organ.

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