In the mean streets of Port Melbourne in the mid-1980s, the students of St Joseph's School were split into two camps: you were either a Sunnyboy fanatic, or a Zooper Dooper acolyte. For me, the choice was simple: Sunnyboys until I die.
The solid wedges of tasty ice were superior in every way, in part because unlike Zooper Doopers, whose plastic edges ripped at the corners of your mouth, Sunnyboys' cardboard containers were mouth-friendly, but also because it usually took an entire play-lunch to consume one.
It was, then, with a pang of acute sadness that I read last week that Sunnyboys had been discontinued. The Daily Juice Co announced the news in typically bleak capitalist terms: "Unfortunately, Sunnyboy has experienced a sustained reduction in consumer demand over a long period of time, making it necessary to delete the product from our range of water ice treats."
Sunrise, sunset; in an era of protein ice-cream, 100 per cent fruit soft serve, and green juice icy-poles, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the humble "ambient ice water" wedge has been sent to the big tuck shop in the sky.
Who needs a solid block of ice, its syrup gradually pooling in the corner of a tetrahedral sheath of foil-lined paper, when you can have a quenelle of cacao and goji berry semifreddo?
As the MasterChef-isation of Australian eating habits has continued apace, so, too, has the twilight of uniquely Australian snacks (or "discretionary foods", as the CSIRO healthy eating test I just flunked tells me) descended. Shapes became "new and improved"; beloved Big M flavours disappeared; ice-creams have shrunk; Red Rooster has been handballed from owner to owner. Sunnyboys are just the latest victim of our national palate's maturation.
Did I contribute to this "sustained reduction in customer demand" by allowing myself to be dazzled by fancier ice treats? Should I not have been in such a rush to grow up? If I could only seize the means of ambient ice water production, I could live out my days in a bubble of suspended nostalgia, a 3KZ sticker on every car and a Bicentennial Memento for every child.
I joke (a little), but something about the death of Sunnyboys stings especially keenly. I had the same feeling the day I stood outside the former site of St Joseph's School, now a "lifestyle" apartment development, and sang Madonna's This Used to be my Playground as I remembered the scent of hot tanbark and concrete play equipment. You can't stop progress.
As the legendary Australian band who took their name from the tetrahedral treat once put it, "Close the doors to the past forever".
Clem Bastow is a Fairfax Media columnist.