The Australians say they are slightly annoyed to have fallen from their position in the top four beer-drinking nations of the world, and they worry about the Czech Republic, which seems to have got the No 1 spot. But you reassure them they can't possibly put away all those mega-litres of beautiful wine and cope with beer as well.
Anyway, the amount of stuff being loaded into eskies, the huge ice-cold boxes they take on picnics, would reassure anyone who feared they were in danger of becoming a country of teetotallers. The grog shops, as always, are considered a licence to print money, but nowadays the guy behind the counter has to be a wine expert as well as having strong arms to carry out crates of beer.
"Do you think that little pinot noir would travel, mate?" asked the man in shorts and a beard.
"When you say, `travel', do you mean rough terrain, four wheel drive, mate?" asked the man in the grog shop. "No, mate, just six hours up the highway and egg nishening in the car."
"Aw then it'll travel OK, mate."
When the bearded man was gone with his case of red, I asked the grog shop man what "egg nishening" was. It was air conditioning, of course, but you knew that.
We travelled ourselves, for four hours up the Pacific Highway from Sydney to a place called Boomerang Beach, near a town called Forster. The road was carved through acres of bush country, thick forests by dark blue lakes and always the glimpse of surf rolling onto beaches on the right-hand side as we went up the map.
Not very far up the map in terms of size. It looks as if we only went a centimetre and a half. Very big country indeed, I noted sagely to myself, as I always do with a brand new sense of insight every time. It had been a very wet winter when we were having our slightly similar wet summer at home, and it meant there was a huge amount of growth in these forests. This is bad news, as summer approaches, for forest fires. If they start, there will almighty of catch fire.
Already the notices are up about the folly of lighting a camp fire anywhere near trees, and the sheer criminal act of tossing away a cigarette end.
The authorities will try to cope, as they always do, when the fires begin. One way of trying to douse them involves helicopters with huge scoops flying low over the ocean and gathering up gallons of sea water which they pour on the flames.
Australian modern myth reports that several bodies of scuba divers have been found in the branches of trees, charred, but still wearing the diving-suits and flippers. People say that the underwater swimmers were unwittingly in the water that was scooped up to put on the flames. Probably not true at all, say the swimmers, but yet they are pretty careful at times of fire if they see a helicopter with a big bucket hovering in the area.
The summer proper hasn't quite begun yet, but a lot of people had travelled to seaside places, as it was a hot weekend. There are dozens of wooded campsites, and Australian families can settle into these in five minutes flat, hooking up to water, gas and electricity, as simply as the rest of us would turn on a switch. They don't even have to bring their own barbecues with them. Parks and campsites are filled with these, you just have to put in a few coins and you get instant flames. Out come the steaks and the snags (Australian for sausages) and the family weekend has begun.
There are retirement homes, summer cottages and motels as well. A lot of these small places have a population of a few hundred in winter, but are well equipped to cope with 20 times that when the season begins. Some come for surfing and sport, some to lie on the beach even though, because of skin cancer fears, it's very politically incorrect to crisp up nowadays.
Some come for the naturist beaches, though as one woman said, you'd need to be really pushed to look at a bit of white flesh, and dangling things, and burned things, if you were prepared to park the car miles away and then climb a hill full of furze bushes and climb again the other side, in order to get to the beach. Still, in the interest of fairness, it should be reported that though our particular group did not consider it worth the climb, there were many cars parked there.
There was a group going to a diamond wedding celebration on a beach. This couple had come out to Australia in 1978 when they were 40 years married, thinking they only had a couple of years left. They wanted to end their days in a bit of sunshine, they said. But somehow, they had got a new lease of life.
"Bad luck on the rellies, wasn't it?" said the old man, gleefully posing for photographs that said "60 Glorious Years". Not far away, others were going to a wedding in the Green Cathedral, which is actually only a huge clump of exotic trees and palms, meeting to make a sort of roof arch, and is greatly in demand for summer weddings. It is an idyllic place to make your vows in a land that lets marriages take place almost anywhere.
And we sat and ate oysters on a wooden veranda with the cicadas singing, and the sun was going down over the scarlet bottle brush trees and the yellow kangaroo paws plant. And hosts told us how they had to shoo away the gorgeous white cockatoos which came and settled on their balconies, because cockatoos were basically larrikin birds, which would peck away and eat bits of the house if not firmly discouraged.
And we talked about how glorious Australia is and how odd it is that people are always reporting the sort of stage-Aussie things they claim to have heard people say.
On the very next day on a bus I heard the driver say: "Come on folks, hurry it on a bit then we'll be off in a flash like the bride's nightie."