Thirteen Acres in Swanson: Rose Backhouse-Smith’s Table

Rose Backhouse-Smith can tell you the name and birthday of every one of her descendants - eight children, twenty-six grandchildren, twenty-five great-grandchildren, two great-great-grandchildren. Ask her about food, and the list gets longer still.

Born in 1937, Rose has lived in Swanson for 53 years. But her relationship with kai started long before that, on a bus. At nine years old, she rode from Pt Chevalier to Ponsonby for lessons in baking, basic cooking, and washing and starching, across the road from the Marist Brothers. It was training for a life she couldn’t yet see coming - feeding a family of ten.

In 1957, Rose married Henry Backhouse-Smith (Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara). His work moved the family around the country in the early years, until they went looking for a place to plant their roots: land with paddocks, big enough for their daughter’s horse. 

They found it in 1972, on Christian Road in Swanson - twelve acres of paddock and an acre of garden. Henry raised a farmhouse to build a second storey underneath it, and later put in a tennis court, giving every kid, cousin, and friend within reach something to do with their hands and their afternoons. A kitchen run on routine and radio.

While the children were small, Rose’s days had a rhythm to them. Dr Paul Lowe’s stories, half an hour on the radio, and her knitting needles going the whole time. Aunt Daisy was the other voice in the house - dispensing recipes, domestic advice, and product tips in a tone Rose still remembers as comforting. 

“Good morning everybody,” she’d begin, and Rose would listen while she cooked for ten.

Food in that house followed its own calendar. Bacon and eggs on Sundays. Big pots of soup and stew through the week. And at Christmas, a hāngī for nearly 60 family and friends, with Rose’s steamed pudding cooked in stainless steel bowls alongside everything else. On the dining room wall hung a plaque: There are no strangers, only friends we haven’t met yet.

Rose lived it - there were always extras at the table, and eventually the garden itself became a wedding venue for family and friends, with receptions spilling onto the tennis court.

What grew, what was gathered, what was bough. The garden carries its own history. 

Three generations of the family had lived in Fiji, and that shows in what Rose still grows and still bakes - banana cake, made with bananas from the backyard.

Not everything came from the garden. Feeding ten people meant a working knowledge of where value was in West Auckland - Ponderosa General Store, Calverts the butcher, and a late-day run into town to Turners and Growers for produce at the marked-down end-of-day price. As the older kids needed pocket money, Rose put in shifts at the tearoom at the top of Scenic Drive, where her sponge and coffee crumble cake went on the menu, and later at the kiwifruit orchards on Christian Road itself, driving tractors and bringing in the harvest - some of her younger children working alongside her.

The kids have their own kai memory of the road home from school: pulling watsonia stalks “greenies”; they called them - from along Christian Road and sucking out the sweet nectar, chewing the fibrous stem for what they describe as a crisp, granny-apple flavour.

Years ago, a few of the grandchildren put together a family recipe book. Rose’s Banana and Pineapple Cake made the cut. So did Fijian Chicken Lo Lo - chicken, onion, rice, and coconut milk, sometimes with kūmara or celery or peas — a dish that carries the Fiji connection forward on a plate, generation to generation.

Rose’s home still holds the evidence of another chapter - Rosedale ceramic vases, figurines, and porcelain dolls from the years she ran ceramics classes from home, locals coming to paint and mould, Henry firing everything in his kiln. It’s not kai, exactly, but it’s the same instinct: bring people in, give them something to do with their hands, feed them while they’re at it.

Between Brownies, surf lifesaving, Swanson School sports, the ceramics classes, the orchard, picnics at Redwood Park, and the weddings on the lawn, the Backhouse-Smith name became a fixture of the Swanson community - because the table was always set for one more.

Story gathered as part of Kai West’s exploration of the past, present, and future of kai across West Auckland. Shared as a taonga, with thanks to Rose Backhouse-Smith and whānau.

Family Recipe Book

Backhouse-Smith family photo taken early 2000s at Rewiti Marae Standing at the back Kevin, Cathy, Maria, Henry, Rose, Barry and Gerard. Sitting in the front is Sarah, Anna and Henry.

Family Garden