CANBERRA—We've heard a lot about mates of late, especially an Ipswich car dealer's mates in high places.
It's a weird and wonderful word, embedded in the Australian psyche.
It symbolises the essence of being Australian, it's a general-purpose greeting, and it whispers of corruption and menace.
And that's without going into the rather different meaning when mate is used as a verb.
Many historians have written about mateship.
The most common view is that the idea was forged in the need to help each other in the unforgiving 19th century Australian bush, became an integral part of the ethos underpinning the early trade unions in the 1890s, and reached its apotheosis in the killing fields of World War I.
Historian Russel Ward, in his 1958 The Australian Legend, wrote that the mythical Australian "above all, will stick to his mates through thick and thin".
Early union leader WG Spence said unionism came to the bushman as a religion. It had in it "that feeling of mateship which he understood".
World War I historian Charles Bean wrote that the chief article of the Australian creed was "that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate".
John Howard, with his great familial interest in that terrible war, thought so highly of mateship that he wanted it included in a preamble to the constitution.
His formulation - "We value excellence as well as fairness, independence as dearly as mateship" - foundered mainly because so many people thought mateship was too blokey.
As it probably was.
Henry Lawson was unlikely to have been thinking of a woman when he wrote: "The greatest pleasure I have ever known is when my eyes meet the eyes of a mate over the top of two foaming glasses of beer."
And even today, a casual "g'day mate" is more likely between men than women.
Gradually the word became more ambiguous, its nuances dependent on tone and context.
This was especially so in the Labor Party, perhaps not surprising, given the bush-union history.
"Maaate," that legendary Labor fixer Graham Richardson was supposed to start his phone calls. It held more threat than goodwill.
But it wasn't exclusive to Labor. Even Howard put menace into mate when he rhetorically, and from afar, addressed Saddam Hussein: "Mate, the game is up."
There were more movements of meaning, from unstated threat to whiff of corruption, summed up in the term Labor mates. Think that, and think WA Inc and its many variants.
The word, in this sense, became absolutely central to one of the most celebrated series of trials in Australia's history.
"And now what about my little mate," High Court judge and Labor luminary Lionel Murphy said to NSW chief magistrate Clarrie Briese.
He was talking about lawyer Morgan Ryan, who was facing prosecution. It led to Murphy being charged, though ultimately acquitted, with attempting to pervert the course of justice.
In the Court of Appeal, learned counsel kept repeating the phrase with differing stresses and pauses to try to show its ambiguity. It was even, rather obscurely, tried in French - copain for mate.
Perhaps it isn't such a jump from an idealised "mate through thick and thin" to the grubbier "looking after your mates".
And perhaps the two converge in mates' rates, deals where everyone benefits except, usually, the tax man.
But then, he's no one's mate.