Mug Shots by Barry Oakley

and spawn others. Files were stored in the hanging garden of the Registry. One must never hoard them or take them home. Bureaucratic battles take place within them. The important thing is to Cover Yourself. Once I neglected to do this and left a flank exposed. An aide-memoire later appeared in the file that was sharply critical of me, signed by a man who always seemed friendly. I sought an explanation from the Office Sage as to why the man hadn’t broached it with me personally. There is file life, said the wise one, and real life, and they need have no connection whatever.
    Positions Must be Filled. It was decided that an export action advertising campaign be discontinued, and the journalist responsible for it resigned, because there was nothing left for him to do. But his position still existed, and applications were invited, and a replacement found.
    For a while, before I had my own office, I shared one with the new appointee. It took him a couple of days to realise there was nothing for him to do either. After a brief period of incredulity, he adjusted. He would open a file, lean back in his chair, rest the file on his chest and fall asleep, often with his mouth open. Filing clerks would sometimes use it as an in-tray to wake him up.
    How could this be? I asked the Sage. Simple, he replied. If the position isn’t filled, it will be abolished and disappear forever.
    Myth of the Smiling Minister. Mr McEwen was Minister for Trade at the time, and there was a photo of him, friendly and smiling, on the receptionist’s desk. One of my fellow Class 8s, deluded by this, decided one Friday on a bold course of action. Needing the minister’s signature on an urgent document, and knowing that he was paying one of his visits to his Melbourne office, he decided to take the paper directly to him, rather than go through the slow-moving bureaucratic hierarchy.
    So he walked down the rarely visited ministerial end of the corridor and braved his Cerberus of a secretary, who agreed, reluctantly, to get the sacred signature for him. He came back in triumph, little knowing what tremors he had set off.
    The minister, furious that a flunkey had shown such temerity, complained to the Secretary of the Department, who passed the censure to the Deputy Secretary, who passed it on to a First Assistant Secretary, and then on down to the Assistant Secretary of the Publicity Branch, the lean and mean Mr Forrest, who dressed down the Deputy Director, who told my colleague that such a thing had never happened before and, if he valued his job, must never happen again. The public service might now have computers, but its structure, I’m sure, still goes back to the days of Byzantium.
    Public service days tended to be dull. I divided them into quarters, with morning and afternoon tea and a lunchtime walk in Fawkner Park in between. Sometimes my boss and I were taken to lunch by design studios that wanted our advertising business. Since there’s nowhere to hide in the modern office, I’d recuperate in the toilet, leaning uncomfortably against the flush handle, which pressed into my back. About three o’clock, if I were still recuperating, I’d hear the foot-dragging limp of an elderly alcoholic journalist who’d make himself comfortable in another cubicle—then there’d be the pop of the cork of his whisky flask.
    Worse: one of the Australian trade commissioners working in the United States came in over a long weekend, entered a cubicle, took off his belt, looped it over the railing above the door, got up on the seat, and jumped. A day later, the caretaker saw his suspended feet in the gap under the door. He had done quickly what was happening to some of us in slow motion. Under the pitiless fluorescence, layered in the files, powdered in the corners of desk drawers with the elastic bands and paper clips, lingered bureaucratic death, finer than dust.

Head down at night
    I might have been coasting a little at