Mug Shots by Barry Oakley

were that legal fiction, a bona fide traveller, and signed a book to this effect. For the rest of the Victorian population, hotels still closed at six.
    In amoral New South Wales, six o’clock closing was abolished in 1955, but Victorians had to wait another ten years, perpetuating one of the great frontier spectacles—the dynamo roar of the Young and Jackson’s drinkers as closing time approached, the lining up of beers as last drinks were called, and the stumbling of drunken men across Flinders Street to the station afterwards.

Dead
    One April morning, Mrs Gillies, the landlady, knocked on my door to say there was an urgent phone call for me. I took it in her panelled lobby, every detail of which still remains clear to me, in the light-flash of the news. It was Lorna Hogan. Terry Mahony, one of our closest friends, had died in hospital, from a gunshot wound, after a long night at a Newman Society ball.
    Terry had gone back with Bill Ginnane (another friend, though less close) to Ginnane’s house. There was a rifle in the spare bedroom where he was recuperating. Somehow it had gone off, fatally wounding Terry. That was all Lorna knew. She was in shock and so was I. Terry had been one of the Newman Society stars, a graduate in law, now working for his father’s firm of solicitors, but his real interests were theological. He knew his Aquinas, and while we waffled, he would have the exactly-right Thomist quote. I’d known him at school, had played cricket and football with him, drank and argued with him, and now he was dead.
    There was an Irish vigil at the Mahony house on the Friday: a night of prayers around an open coffin. I didn’t go. I simply couldn’t imagine him waxen and inert, arms folded across his chest. The Requiem Mass and funeral followed on the Saturday morning, and I felt the weight of him as we shouldered him to his grave.
    There was grief, puzzlement and then questions: a rifle in the bedroom had somehow discharged. There was nothing in the respectable dailies, but Truth , the Melbourne scandal sheet, was right onto it: ‘Solicitor shot dead. Secret police probe’ was the front-page lead a week later. ‘Homicide detectives who have been conducting a hush-hush probe into the tragedy have been unable to find out how he was wounded.’
    Four months later there was an inquest, and again Truth was the only paper to cover it. ‘Hush hush death’ was the headline, and it got worse: ‘Someone, somewhere, has been trying ever since to hush up the whole affair. Now the coroner’s court has made an “open” finding, but how and why Terence Mahony was fatally wounded remains a mystery.
    â€˜Ginnane said that he had returned to the kitchen and had been reading the paper when he heard a noise from the room, and Mahony’s only words to him were “Bill, Bill, I’m shot—get a doctor”. Senior Detective Carton testified that he could not find any suspicious circumstances, nor any reason why Mahony would commit suicide (he was engaged to an attractive young woman and his legal career was going well).
    â€˜But’, Truth added, ‘further evidence, which may have assisted the coroner to reach a definite conclusion, was not before him. In an official file there is a statement from Dr John Francis, who saw Mahony in hospital. Dr Francis said he asked another doctor in front of Mahony if the shooting was accidental. Mahony shook his head, indicating that it was not. Yet he was not called upon to give evidence.
    â€˜This is further complicated by the fact that Ginnane had earlier said that he was “sitting up in bed having a cup of tea when he heard a noise”. This inconsistency was never questioned—nor the fact that Mahony lingered for a day in hospital but gave no one an account of what had happened.’
    Since Bill Ginnane, who went on to become Reader in Philosophy at the Australian National University, is now