University Advancement Office Alumni and Friends

Degree: Arts 1963, Law (Honours) 1964

Current Position: Retired corporate oil and gas lawyer; now an active railway photographer

Shane McCarthy's career as an in-house legal counsel to the Shell company saw him travel the world advising on energy projects. His work involved him in crucial negotiations, from confronting oil shortages in the 1970s to carrying out Australia's largest ever export deal.

Since retiring in 2004, Shane has been able to devote himself to another interest - the art of railway photography - that dates back to his student days. The result has been his book Patterns of Steam, an album of evocative black-and-white photographs of steam locomotives taken in Australia and New Zealand between 1964 and 1985.

I started at Melbourne University in 1959 and left in 1963 after gaining a BA and LLB (Hons). I did articles with Moorhead and Moorhead, a small city firm. In 1966, I joined Pavey Wilson Cohen and Carter (later merged into Corrs Chambers Westgarth) and did mainly commercial work, including corporate financing and administration, share and debenture issues and the like, and also some trade practices and shipping work.

In 1971 I joined The Shell Company of Australia Ltd, and that was the start of a 33-year career with the company. For me, joining Shell was the best employment decision I ever made. I remember doing a medical assessment, and the nurse telling me Shell was a very good employer, a comment I can thoroughly vouch for. Someone else said I would have a cushy job, which was 100 per cent wrong!

One of my first jobs at Shell was to form a company to engage in grass-roots mineral exploration ventures. I became part of a small team that set up many such ventures, and when Shell started getting into coal, I was closely involved with that as well. I was also involved in the many government enquiries into the oil industry that occurred in the 1970s.

In 1978, I was offered a posting with one of the Shell Group service companies based in London. During that posting I did work in shipping and oil trading including, notably, advising the Shell committee which had to allocate crude oil around the world in circumstances of force majeure when stocks were reduced as a result of the second oil shock. I also continued my work in coal, and advised on potential mines in Tanzania and Colombia. Much of the work involved travel, and I visited many countries while based in London. In 1980, my second year in London, I moved into work on liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, and advised on projects in Brunei, Nigeria and Malaysia.

At the same time, I was becoming involved in the development of the North West Shelf (NWS) project off Western Australia, in which Shell Australia had an interest. I became the principal lawyer responsible for the drafting and negotiation of contracts with the Japanese companies that had formed a consortium to take the gas. The negotiations took until 1985, but when executed that year those contracts were (and still are) Australia’s largest ever single export transaction.

I said my farewells to the corporate legal world in 2004. During my working life I had visited Japan more than 60 times, so when I retired I asked to go there again with my wife Ros on one of the NWS LNG ships as a retirement present. It was the trip of a lifetime! I had already decided that my first retirement project would be the photographic book that has now appeared as Patterns of Steam, and so I declined all offers of post-retirement legal work as a consultant.

My interest in railway photography started when I was at Melbourne University. I had two friends who were interested in railways and used to take off to curious and remote locations like south-west Western Australia. Steam was disappearing fast in those days, and until 1972, which was the official end of steam on the government railways, I was busy most weekends and holidays taking photographs. Most of the photographs in the book date from those years, with the obvious qualification that many of the earliest ones were not so good!

Patterns of Steam is my second book – the first one, Impressions of Steam, was published in 1975 by Angus and Robertson. I published the new book myself, which meant I had complete control over the design and the choice of printing processes.

I’m also very interested in architecture and other non-railway subjects. Over the years I’ve had three exhibitions – railway photographs at Brummel’s Gallery, Melbourne in 1973-1974, landscapes of western Tasmania at Open Leaves Bookshop and Gallery, Melbourne in 1977 and architectural photographs at Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne in 1991. Some of my photographs are held in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and in private collections.