Here’s something you’ll never see in writing. In fact, so deep and dark is the conspiracy to keep a lid on this that I may well be signing my death-warrant.

Here goes: why is Melbourne’s coffee so bad? I mean, seriously. It goes from the disgustingly bad variety served in the cafes of Lygon Street’s Little Italy to the gut-wrenching, undrinkably bad at Melbourne Airport. And this isn’t ‘bad’ as in ‘good’. Sometimes bad is just bad, and the stuff being served by this city’s poncy baristas is really bad.

How can you put it kindly? What passes for coffee on either side of the Yarra is – like 99 per cent of coffee served elsewhere in Australia – simply disgusting. It’s ferociously, unapologetically bitter and the coffee beans have been nuked beyond recognition by a smart-arse punk banging away at an oversized, imported coffee machine.

And don’t get me started on the milk – heated and re-heated to a point where it just wants to curdle up and die.

In short – it’s terrible, an insult to anyone with even a passing interest in what they drink. In fact, forget waterboarding: if we had sent a couple of young Melburnians with faux-Polynesian tattoos to serve up espressos in Guantanamo Bay, Osama bin-Laden would be in US hands.

All this, of course, is undeniable. In fact, that this city’s coffee is crap is the most self-evident of truths this country will ever have to confront. Just taste the stuff: there is simply no dialectical wiggle-room.

Why is it, then, that popular perception is the exact opposite? How could it be that Melbourne people swan around the country boring anyone they meet with stories of how great their coffee is and – by implication – how oh-so-very European we all are?

This is worse than omerta, because at least a culture of silence would ignore the problem. We’ve actually talked it up to the point that we’ve convinced ourselves black is white.

Sadly, the suppression of truth has come from an unholy alliance between two separate, but very powerful, social forces.

On the one hand there are Melbourne’s self-appointed Italian characters. These are the old restaurateurs who know how to camp-up the hand-waving when the cameras are rolling, and who have a very simple take on society. Before they opened their restaurants in the 1950s – they argue – Australian society had nothing to offer. The culinary culture was as boring as bat-poo.

Then there’s the self-flagellating, Anglo-Celtic upper middle-class. These are people who feel that their own cultural antecedents are somehow not quite exotic enough, so they seek out anything they suspect might have some ethnic authenticity. These are the patrons of the hand-waving restaurateurs, and when they’re told that the coffee they’re been served is the real-Italian-deal, they believe it.

And why wouldn’t they? On the cafes’ wall there are photos of buxom girls on vespas speeding through the streets of Rome, and the guy at the bar is really rude. It’s our little piece of Italy. So authentic – so Melbourne.

Why is it, then, that an Italian landing in Melbourne today would throw up after drinking a locally brewed coffee? And why would he laugh to see it being served in a glass?

There’s a truth here that dares not speak its name. The loud, obnoxious-but-so-Italian restaurateurs who flood local media with quotable quotes are – shock! horror! – just Australians with accents. Few of them had sold coffee before emigrating and when the espresso machines started to arrive they had to work out how to use them. It was trial and error.

That trial an error is continuing and Melbourne’s coffee drinkers are the guinea-pigs.

But why is it so? Why can you land at Fiumicino Airport and be served beautifully light, sweet and delicate macchiato while Australian baristas give every coffee-bean they encounter the Lucas Heights treatment?

What’s required is brutal honesty and the end of myth-making. Italian-Australians – starting with loud-mouthed cafe owners – need to be honest and recognise that in many aspects of their lives there is no continuity with Italian traditions. And the bored, Anglo-Celtic establishment should stop embracing these charlatans in its sad and insulting attempt to appear more European.

The only exotic side to Melbourne’s cafe culture is how many people want to wish it into existence.