As I pilot my way to that bourne beneath the daisies, in what Carmo calls the Riviera of the Western Suburbs, I have been treating myself to a weekly visit to the swish bistro called Bar Romanee in Anderson Street in the Yarraville Village.  It is well and amiably run and welcoming, and I am accepted as if I were a member of the club. 

Usually, I sit at the bar nearest the kitchen.  I can marvel at the cooking techniques there, and the fancy concoctions conjured up behind the bar.  At times it reminds me of the teamwork on display in Das Boot – people working in harmony for a purpose.

Last evening, there was a big Sunday crowd, perhaps because it was Father’s Day – one of those sponsored marketing jobs that does not loom large in my family. 

I arrive at about 5.30.  A young family of four was seated at a table.  That is not a cheap night out.  Mum was well dressed under a carefully manicured hair-do – bobs or bangs? – and an expensive cardi – over which she put an even more expensive overcoat on her departure.  Her blood temperature must be different to Dad’s – he had a tee to show his pictures above his shorts.  The children looked about eight or nine, snappily attired in casual clothes.  I don’t think they went to the State School up the road.  They were anything but overawed by the occasion – they looked quite at home, but they were not noisy.  

After an hour or so, another couple arrived with one child and sat at an adjoining table.  They all knew each other, but the foursome was finishing what looked like a three-course meal.  You could get even money that at least one family was travelling in a black Teutonic SUV, and I find myself wondering, especially after the panel beaters looked after my Alfa, how people can afford these things if they pay the bill with money on which they have paid tax.

Where I sit is where some come to pay their bill.  (I don’t know when this Parisian practice started here.  I simply call for the bill with the time-honoured signal.)  Then I looked down, and beside me was the young girl from the foursome bearing an iPhone well lit up.  ‘Have you come to settle up?’  ‘Yes.’  A bit later, after no scrutiny of the bill: ‘Tip?’  ‘Yes’.  This being an honest house, three figures would not have been added.

People born here at the end of 1945, as I was , are definitive babyboomers.  Ten years later, olive oil and garlic had barely arrived.  There was six o’clock closing, and only about four restaurants, including the very toffy Menzies Hotel, in the city of Melbourne.  They enjoyed a status at least as high as the Latin or Society did later. 

A night out at one of those places was a very big deal for people like my folks, Mac and Norma – certainly only for a special event, and not more than once a year.  Only the wealthiest could afford to take their children to such places, but I have a vague recollection of Mac and Norma taking me to one in Spring Street – with lamps on the tables.  It would have been about 1955 – before the Olympics and television.  Great care would have been taken with dressing.  Mac and Norma may have had a sherry and then a glass of wine each – which they never drank at home – with a three-course meal that they would have chosen with one eye firmly on the price. 

There were no credit cards then – when they did arrive, Mac and Norma did not trust or use them.  Mac would have paid in cash, which had been put away for the purpose, after agonising about the tip. 

But what the hell?  I still have a flickering image of the night, and we would have motored home in the Ford Anglia, with me on my knees in the back, and my head on my arms on the back seat.  (I would later form the view that Mac was not the world’s best driver – which was unfortunate, because Norma was the world’s worst back seat driver.)

Mac and Norma would find the tariffs for eating out now well beyond comprehension – as incomprehensible as a man walking into a restaurant and not covering his tats.  They would say that one of the reasons that the prices are so high is that most people don’t pay the bill with real money.  They just add another stat to the ether. 

And I had much the same view when I started eating out in style.  Shortly after we were married, my wife and I were taken to the Southern Cross for dinner by a shipping magnate (who had unprintable views about a brash unionist called Bob Hawke).  This glistening monument was the successor to the Menzies as the dearest place to eat.  We had drinks in the lounge first.  I could not believe the prices, and lived in terror that I might be called on to buy a round – I did not have enough cash on me – or, for that matter, at home. 

That danger passed, but I was amazed that the magnate ordered caviar – which was brought in on a block of ice and mixed with a sauce with a majestic grandeur becoming to the price – and the magnate proceeded to leave half of it!  (The last time I had been to the Southern Cross, it was on night shift as an industrial cleaner working in the fan housing fourteen floors above the kitchen – through which my charge hand, Len Foster – may blessings be upon him – directed gross and vulgar abuse down to the night chef, Rocko.  Who did not take it like a sportsman.)

Well, all that was generations ago, but I would be seduced insensibly – as Gibbon may have put it – to be free with credit in ways that scandalised Norma and Mac.

Now, it is one thing to take kids out to a flash restaurant.  But it is altogether a different thing to allow them to believe that they can call the shots, and that they can be free with money because there is so much of it about.  What about manners?  ‘Thank you very much., We enjoyed your hospitality.’  Or do we just customise kids to accept that others should be grateful for their patronage, and then authorise them to set in train communications between robots in settlement of the tariff – when all courtesy then dissolves in the ether?

What I saw was the uncomely marriage between rising apparent wealth and an even more assertive technology – and the growing chasm between winners and losers.  Here was a perfect union of the corrupting effect of cheap money and soul and courtesy destroying technology.  It is all so precocious, and the stuff of history at its worst.  We are succumbing to the ignorance if not obliteration of our story from which our failures come. 

And, as it happens, that is so with a much greater issue facing this nation now.

Let me give an analogy on spoiling children.  The living I made as a lawyer allowed me, after about a dozen years, to fly to Europe or the US once a year – I also got to the other continents, and Asia and the Antarctic.  But I did so down the back, year after back breaking year, until I got to the stage where I decided that if I could not go in comfort, I would not go at all.  (I took that decision after a client sent me to the US up the very front.) 

Mac and Norma never reached that stage – and they would not have done so on principle.  But in part because of what they did for me, I was able to do so.  And the one thing that got to me when I did do was to see families wealthy enough to bring their kids into this Elysium in the sky for which I had laboured so long.

Well, the old saying was bootstraps to bootstraps in three generations.  And the big spenders and timid politicians are doing their best to fulfil that prophecy by denying their grandchildren the capacity to buy their own home.

This is not a good trajectory in a young nation, or any other.  The rot set in when those who had the benefit of a free tertiary education decided to deprive those coming later of that benefit.  That is not how history should work  But I am pleased to say that at this bistro I find young people committed to finding a place in the world – and let the robots and us old grumpies be damned.