It has been there, squat and purposeful in the corner of the kitchen, radiating warmth and an aromatic meld of roasting meats and baking pastries since my maternal grandparents moved into their family home so many years ago.

When I first donned short pants and a stiffly starched shirt and was marched, very much against my will, to the local Catholic church to begin my education, it was the Kooka which became a source of lollies for annual fêtes. The kitchen would smell of sugar and boiling water and the honey-sweet perfume of cooling toffees and trays of pink and white coconut ice as my Grandfather, self-appointed chief confection maker, laboured to fill our quota.

On Sundays, it was from this oven that on rare and joyous occasions, a roast chicken emerged, one which hours before had been scratching unconcernedly around the chook pen at the bottom of their yard. It was from this same oven that came - and still do - the best apple pies the world has ever seen, and teacake! Lord, don't start me on the teacakes, rich and fluffy and served warm from the oven with a light dusting of cinnamon.

Grandma broke the news last weekend. "I'm going to see if anyone wants to buy it," she announced nodding towards the Kooka. "I'm going to get a new stove," creating a shockwave which would not have been greater had she declared she was turning her back on the Church of Rome and embracing Islam.

Get rid of the Kooka? Surely not. I could, of course, see her point. One new stove every 50 years was hardly a domestic extravagance. If her next stove lasted as long as the Kooka, Gran would be about 130 years of age when it became due for replacement and may by then have begun to weary of cooking a baking.

Regardless, the news that the stove was to go came as a jolt for it was the source of many a childhood memory. It was responsible for my introduction to Asian cuisine when my father brought home a bag of what looked like undercooked potato chips.

   "They're Chinese," he said. "A mate brought them into work."
   "What do you do with them?" we asked.
   "Cook them in hot oil," he replied.
   "Beauty," we chorused and hauled out the frying pan.

Tomato sauce has long been the condiment of choice in the Willems/O'Hanlon house, my uncle covering everything placed before him - with the exception of porridge - in a thick, red coating. Presuming that Chinese, whoever they were, also used tomato sauce in significant quantities, I doused a huge plate of the chips in half a bottle of tomato sauce and ate the lot. It was lunchtime the next day before I stopped vomiting.

   "It can't have been the sauce," said Dad, who believed that when taken in sufficient quantities, tomato sauce would cure anything from rabies to rubella.
   "No," I gasped in between upchucks. "Musta been the chips."

It was this stove that played a central role in our family's early experiments with alternative medicine. Gran being ahead of her time in seeking a natural cure for Grandad's chronic asthma.

Given a recipe for a remedy by a herbalist, she hurried off to buy the ingredients. Inexperienced in such matters, she misunderstood the instructions, mistaking the direction to boil half a dozen cloves of garlic for one to boil six entire knobs. I seem to recall that liquorice, also, was involved and Gran boiled up the lot in a large pot.

You could smell the stench in the next suburb but she persisted, determined to deliver that miracle cure to Grandad, ladling the odious mush into a cloth and creating a poultice which she placed on his chest. His shrieks were heard several kilometres away as the dangerously overpowered mix burnt through several layers of skin. The smell had to be experienced to be believed and for weeks, whenever he boarded a bus, everyone else would get off.

His asthma was completely unaffected and he continued to wheeze, the difference being that where once he had merely been an asthmatic, he was now a smelly asthmatic.

Not all my stove memories are fond ones. It was this same stove that produced boiled Queensland Blue pumpkin, hateful yellow chunks of which would sit on my plate and at which I would stare, stoney-faced awaiting an opportunity to slide them off my plate and into my pocket, from there to be offloaded into the bin at the first opportunity.