A salute to the great MCCarthy!

He was already very old when I first met him.
He would shuffle to the door of his shop, fly undone, eye twinkling. (The other one was glass.)

He was the Oz equivalent to Les Paul, bright and inventive, our own true guitar pioneer, and before that, pianist at the silent flicks. (The music folio was bookmarked for gallops, romantic music, here a waltz, there a march, ok you get the picture!)

He was in the orchestra at the Palais when they had a dance floor in front of the screen.

He was guitarist in the ABC orchestra for live radio. The announcer would toodle off to splash his boots, the wags in the orchestra would speed up the song, the announcer would hurry back flushed, and, OOMPH sit on a whoopy cushion.

He even invented the electric guitar. Communications not being what they are today, the electric guitar had numerous genuine inventors. He dragged Carnegie down from his Financiers office above Allans music in Collins Street Melbourne into Allans, and connected the guitar to a gramophone. He never got the financial backing he sought because he was told it would never sell!

I struck up a great friendship with Peter McCarthy and if I didn't have an excuse to visit him, I would drop in anyway, and listened, enthralled by the stories he would tell. I even visited him at his home in Stawell Street Burnley when he retired.

He built great amplifiers. (brand name: Maxim). I had a twin channel 60 watt RMS amp head custom built. It was powered by a pair of KT88's. My contribution to invention was to have Peter modify the speaker box I used. It had four 12 inch Celestions in it, and I had it wired and complete with a switch so that I could run either 2 or 4 speakers at once, or have TWO amplifiers plugged into the one box using 2 speakers each.
It was a great sounding amp, but eventually valves became scarce and extremely expensive. I have used solid states since then because of reliability and lack of maintenance costs.
Peter could use a soldering iron into very advanced years, which I have struggled with, ever since I have needed specks. He had so many electric shocks in the course of his trade that he could tell just by feel which part of the amp he touched that he shouldn't have! 240V AC feels different to 450V from the large smoothing capacitor, or the 6V DC in the preamp section.

He co-invented a waterless washing machine using sound, but the subsonic noise wasn't able to be isolated sufficiently. The co-inventors found that they would get terse and argumentative with each other when the machine was in operation. They shelved that project!

I sold my Maxim amps years ago, but sentiment says it would be great to find one.
If anyone has a Maxim amp sitting disused in the garage, please email me!