As someone who boasts of having read every published word on the Erebus accident, I had little choice but to spend NZD34.99 buying “Breaking Ranks” by James McNeish, which includes a biography of Justice Mahon. I loath that late Honourable gentleman so was delighted with the beginning at page 211:
"Sam Mahon tells the story of a family Christmas in Auckland during which … his father took out a thin cigar and lit it. ‘Father, it isn’t polite to smoke between courses,’ Janet chided. Whereupon Judge Mahon blew out a stream of smoke towards the ceiling, rested the cigar on a plate and skipped nimbly around the table, tapping his wife and daughter lightly on the breast as he passed, then sat down and picked up his cigar where he had left it. ‘Gracious, Peter, what on earth was that about?’ said Margarita, mystified, as they all were. ‘That? That, Mother,” the judge said, after a pause, ‘was the titter that ran around the crowd."
It was all downhill after that: After Mahon resigned as a judge he was engaged as a guest lecturer at the Auckland University’s Law School. It was there that he was befriended by other fatuous windbags, one of whom was Stuart Macfarlane. Another was Bernard Brown, who has written the epilogue to Mr McNeish’s book – so it appears that McNeish might be just another of Mahon’s camp followers. He clearly did not bother with any research: “… just before they took off, someone at Air New Zealand had punched the wrong digits into the plane’s navigational computer …” (page 299). Whoever punched the digits into the navigational computer is not a matter of much importance but as everyone who has researched the accident will know, and that group does not include Mr McNeish, the digits were punched in by the pilots. The purported justification for McNeish's intellectual laziness is at page 238:
“There are several ‘truths’. Mine is based in part on the book Mahon wrote shortly before he died, 'Verdict on Erebus'. No one else talked to experts on three continents, plumbed the enigma of ‘whiteout’ and the navigational issue, pored over 284 documents and exhibits and sifted through3000 papers after listening to evidence for 75 days. I make no apology for taking sides.”
Thirty-five bucks. For what? Nothing, except the daughter and the tit-tapping.