‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ had gone down well, but this other anti-family favourite, this breathy multilingual celebration of German incontinence – a song about boys not girls – was received rapturously, uniting in their appreciation the two distinct styles of Australian Ganymede represented at the bar: the butch-brutal in tight blue jeans and sleeveless shirts, with ‘Mum’ (but never ‘Dad’) tattooed across the biceps, and the more evanescent, in teased coiffure and little white bunched-up shorts.

As soon as the SGFV had finished what she called her ‘set’, we rose to take a turn around the gardens. A lush jungle of palms, strung with coloured lights, surrounded the swimming pool. The morals were more conventional out here than inside. Only a few children splashed about in the pool, while their parents sat at white tables and ate prawn and scallop kebab accompanied, as every meal is accompanied in Australia, by slices of tinned beetroot, tinned potato salad, tinned sweetcorn, coleslaw, and grated carrots with sultanas. The company and the cuisine notwithstanding, it was still possible to believe, looking at the sliver of moon through the palm trees, that one was in Asia, in the garden of Raffles, say, waiting to hear if one had been ostracized, for misbehaviour with the natives, from one’s club.

On the way back inside we were accosted by an old-style Aussie in his sixties, a Chips Rafferty with a craggy profile under a slouch hat.

‘I’ve just been called an incorrigible old ratbag,’ he said. ‘I know what an old ratbag means but I’ll have to look incorrigible up in my Collins dictionary.’

He didn’t wait for a reply. Australians are masters of throwaway irony and they don’t want you handing it back. Later on I caught him throwing it at someone else. ‘. . . but incorrigible I’ll have to go to my thesaurus for,’ I heard him say. I noticed that he pretended to be bandy sometimes, as well as slow, as if to make you think that he’d spent his life in the saddle, far from the cunning wiles of civilization. But at the very end of the evening, after the SGFV had finished her special thank-you to Ella and Billie, I spotted him at the bar having his balls squeezed by one of the brutal androgynes with blonded hair. He didn’t seem to object to this, or even to make any comical display of covering his parts. He stayed exactly where he was, spinning some stockman’s yarn, submitting himself to the vicissitudes of contemporary sociableness. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was desirable that such peace prevailed between the generations in Australia these days. Or whether there was nothing new about it whatsoever. Whether it wasn’t, after all, just good old-fashioned mateship in action.