Ice Cream Dreams

By Grant Whitehouse. First published in the Kookaburra 2024

On the windowsill in the shed at our bach sits an aluminum ice cream scoop. It lies there beside old brass tacks, fuses and screws. I saw it at our last stay while looking for something and it got me thinking about how we came to have the bach.

Readers of my previous Kookaburra stories may remember we had a dairy in Mt Roskill in the early 70’s and it was after selling the shop that Mum and Dad purchased our property at Kawau. The ice cream scoop is a relic from that dairy and a reminder of why we are here.

When Mum and Dad bought the shop, they knew that ice creams and milkshakes could be a magnet for customers. “Make and sell great milkshakes and generous ice creams and the public will come from miles around. And while there they will pick up a few things.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Mum made a smashing thick shake. A big scoop of ice cream, milk ladled from the stainless-steel drum in the fridge, a squirt of syrup and maybe a dash of malt. They were top-notch and they were a key to them turning that dairy from a run-down corner store into a thriving local business. Our bach was built from thousands of reaches into the big display freezer armed with that scoop.

That got me thinking; what’s your ice cream scoop? What was the effort, or idea, or inspiration that allowed you and your whānau to purchase your bach? It’s a fair guess that most owners at Kawau had to put in some hard yards to afford a second house, a little place in paradise. You may have inherited it but I’m sure your parents had to work hard to buy and maintain it. But either way there might have been an ‘ice cream dream’ that led you to Kawau.

Today a bach might seem like a luxury to many but they reflect effort undertaken to build a life beyond the normal. You could instead have added a pool and deck at home or another bedroom or a second car or have gone to Disneyland. But you would still be living most of your life in suburbia and wondering what more could you offer your kids or yourselves?

That is the decision Mum and Dad made. By not spending that money back at home they probably suffered on the property ladder. But they had Kawau. And Mark and I and our families have benefited from that decision in ways that we are still coming to terms with.

With the cost of living, high property prices, mortgages and ferry tickets, the dream is not an easy one today. We will probably see less lower income families buying here. It’s just too hard. But multi-family arrangements are becoming more common, and we are still seeing young families picking up vacant land up the end of Starboard Arm and above Schoolhouse Bay and putting in the mahi to establish their little island bolthole.

We should encourage them because a diverse community has always been part of the magic of the island. You can know people for years at Kawau and never see their house in town, or know what they really do, how they live or how much they have. That is the great leveller that Kawau is. Real status comes from being able to clean the carburettor on an outboard, or fillet a John Dory, or identify a tree seed. That’s what matters here.

Just about everyone has their ice cream scoop story; the second jobs, the scarified overseas holidays, the business idea, the hard work on the farm, office or workshop - the effort that was put in to benefit your family and the generations to come.

The last time our ice scoop was used was to dip into the plastic ashes urns that contained Mum and Dad’s remains to distribute them in the bush behind the bach. A fitting task and one it was perfect for. Now it sits on the shed windowsill, covered in dust and cobwebs and every time I’m in there looking for some glue, or a square drive bit, or a brass tack, I see it and think of them and their ice cream dream that brought us here.