Treena was born in Perth, Western Australia in April 1938 to Samoan and German parents. A few years later Treena’s father, a policeman was sent to work in Samoa. In 1945 when Treena was seven, she and her mother Caroline (Carrie) Netzler/McPhee sailed for Auckland aboard the Matua, leaving Treena's younger brother Charles behind in Samoa to be raised by his grandparents.

Treena was desperately seasick the whole crossing, and adjusting to New Zealand food wasn't much easier once she arrived. Cabbage, in particular, she couldn't stand - she'd sneak it into the fireplace when no one was looking, then dig it back out once it had burned down to nothing, rather than eat it. Money was tight; Carrie worked most nights as a seamstress to provide for them, which meant Treena spent a lot of that first New Zealand childhood on her own, walking three-quarters of an hour each way to Mt Eden School, then coming home to wash the family's clothes by hand.

By 1952, Carrie had remarried, an Englishman named Peter Wotton, and the family moved onto a farm at the end of Smale Street in Pt Chevalier. Peter kept his day job selling cardboard packaging, but the farm still ran on its own steam: cows for fresh milk, the beginnings of a household that grew and raised what it ate.

Then, in 1953, the bulldozers arrived. The Ministry of Works had decided to run the motorway across the water to Te Atatū, straight through the Wottons' farm, and nobody had thought to tell the family first, or offer to buy them out. They lost the property and had to start again. When Peter marched off to the land office to demand a pay-out for the loss of their farm, he was given a small amount which helped pay for the New Lynn property.

They found three acres on Hutchinson Avenue in New Lynn, and settled along with their cows, chooks, ducks, turkeys, horses, a vegetable garden, and an orchard of apple and peach trees, with paddocks leased out to locals for grazing. 

Treena's chores included milking - a job made whimsical with the family cat, who'd sit patiently beside her waiting for a teat to be pointed her way so she could catch the warm milk straight in her mouth. The turkeys were raised specifically for the family's New Year's celebration each year, and plucking the tough old birds was, by Treena's own account, the job she disliked most.

Life on the farmstead ran on picking, peeling, stewing, and preserving fruit through the season. As a teenager, Treena learned to cook - roasts, trifles, Christmas cakes - and Carrie's pavlovas, made with the farm's own duck eggs, became the dish the family was known for. New Lynn saw plenty of gatherings and parties over the years, and it was at these that Carrie brought out the recipes carried over from their years in Samoa: pineapple cake, and palusami.

The next generation kept the same instinct alive in a different form. Treena married Jacobus (Jaap) Van Nes, a Dutchman, and together they raised seven children. Jaap built his own business supplying green grocers across the North Island with golden crumpets, shortbread, and fresh produce - crumpets and shortbread became such a fixture of the Van Nes household that the kids took to smuggling them downstairs and hiding them under their mattresses.

In later years when Treena and Jaap travelled overseas, their seven children would stay at the New Lynn farmstead with their grandparents - the same paddocks and animals folding into a second generation of childhoods.

Peter died in 1979, and Carrie sold the New Lynn farm not long after.

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 Treena Van Nes and whānau.