Remember the tiny red, green and white cocktail onions impaled on toothpicks along with chunks of soapy cheese, pineapple and pieces of slimy salami? How about rice salads decorated with bits of dried coconut and slices of orange or platters stacked high with buttered slices of white bread?

Throw in some pastel painted fibro fence panels, a raging wood fire enclosed by bricks and topped with a heavy steel plate and you had a barby - Australian style in the halcyon 1950s and 1960s. Well, at least it would have been halcyon if the food had been edible.

But that didn't worry those of us who were kids at the time. We thought that sausages, like old Fords, only came in one colour - black. Steaks were usually reserved for the grown-ups and they were cut thin because most meat was a lot tougher in the days before feedlotting. After case hardening over a roaring fire, the steaks would be speared with a long fork and proudly placed on waxed paper plates - where they lay gleaming like anthracite waiting patiently for the technicolour additions of mixed fruit and vegetable salads.

In addition to the vast opportunities it provided to ruin food, a barbecue was a great social event. It was the first introduction for most Australians to eating outdoors in their own backyards. It also marked the only time it was permissible for the typical Australian male to cook. For many others, it was an opportunity to peel back a bit of that old Anglo-Saxon reserve and ask the neighbours in for a meal and a beer (only Very Serious Drinkers and recently arrived Europeans drank wine in those days).

Once television arrived in the second half of the 1950s, the backyard barby took on a new dimension. TV shows such as 'Leave it to Beaver' and 'My Three Sons' depicted an 'average' American lifestyle - a lifestyle that appeared incredibly sophisticated and luxurious to the vast majority of Australians.

It was the first glimpse of the good life for most of us and it had a profound influence. Australians (those with the money anyway) could now shake off the British obsession with understatement and build long and low ranch style homes, buy multi-hued cars with fins and build giant barbecues that dominated their backyards.

These brick or concrete barbys were fuelled with wood - lots of it. Most Australians never really took to charcoal - the world's most commonly used heat source for cooking. Instead we happily chopped wood right up until the early 1960s when the first gas flat top barbys were manufactured in Sydney.

The golden era of the mega barbys was also shortened by the arrival of charcoal barbecues such as the minimalist Hibachi in the 1970s and the Weber kettle in the early 1980s. These were mainly purchased by trendy urban sophisticates who used them when they weren't holding fondue parties.

The growing trend towards gas barbys was boosted by legislation banning backyard conflagrations in capital cities and their ridiculous ease of use. No longer was it necessary to wait around for wood to become coals - it was now a case of turn a valve and you're set to burn.

And that is why trolley barbecues have become, by far, the most popular outdoor cooking appliances in Australia.

Around four out of five these days are sold with a swing-up metal hood. This feature has made them more versatile and consequently more popular. Until it became an affordable, common accessory Australians used their gas flat tops for grilling and, if they roasted outside at all, it was done in a kettle barbecue. Now, most people have convinced themselves they can have it all in the one unit.

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