Eddie and Frank McGuire: good cop, bad cop

It would serve the public interest.

If Frank is wrong then the appropriate thing to do is to apologise to the police officers--and their families--involved in the shootings for the distress caused. If, however, Frank’s claims are proven then he needs to be hailed as a civic hero.

The time has come to put up or shut up !

Eddie and Frank remain Australia’s premier media brother act. Television reporters and brothers Karl and Peter Stefanovic come a distant second with Karl’s exaggerated larrikin Aussie shtick--so much so that Karl mispronunces his surname as "Stefa-Novik" when it should be "Stefan-Ovich".

According to the late Rowan Byrnes, what you see is what you get with the McGuire Brothers, including proudly pronouncing their Scottish surname correctly !

Byrnes was a popular Melbourne tramway union official whose life was tragically cut short by a car accident in 1989. Eddie wrote: "He was one of my best mates.”

Byrnes left behind a wife, of Macedonian background, and a baby son Jack, later to become a singer and a contestant on the television talent how Australian Idol.

In 1987 I was a young reporter undergoing a cadetship with the Australian Macedonian weekly newspaper in Melbourne. Rowan from time to time would drop into the newspaper’s office for a chat and a cold drink.

Naturally the topic turned to Eddie McGuire.

“Eddie is a true son of the working class,” Rowan would say. “He’ll go far.”

One of Rowan’s favourite anecdotes was Eddie’s brief flirtation with university study in the early 1980s:

“Eddie left his course because he wasn’t interested in learning about history or the Russian Revolution, he just wanted to report on Footy (Australian Rules Football).”