The Mayne Inheritance

by Rosamond Siemon

  With a man as belligerent and unstable as Patrick, who had no compunction about the pain he might inflict on others, it seems reasonable to accept that his behaviour within the family could be similarly unpleasant. Rosanna, now fifteen, was being taught by the Sisters of Mercy at the new All Hallows’ School in ‘‘Adderton’’, Dr Fullerton’s former home across the way from Bishop Quinn’s ‘‘Dara’’. Isaac, thirteen, and William, nine, were at the Normal School at the corner of Adelaide and Edward Streets. All three were old enough to have been affected by their father’s behaviour, especially his rages when he was thwarted. It is highly likely that the tragic adult life of Mayne’s children, while partly hereditary, may also be attributed to his treatment of them. It is fairly significant that Mary Emelia, six at the time of her father’s death, and James, a toddler of four, were the least affected of his children.

  Mary Mayne, their mother, proved to be a particularly strong woman. Unschooled she may have been but she was capable and intelligent, and, if she could not do much to protect the children who were old enough to defy their protection of the infants. There is no evidence that her mother, Mary Kelly, lived with the family or was any help to them. She died, and presumably lived, at Bowen Hills, but appeared to have no money; she may have occupied one of Patrick’s houses. Ann Mayne, Patrick’s younger sister, who had lived with them for barely a year, was probably reluctant or unable to stand up to the brother on whom she was entirely dependent. The man who gradually took a benevolent interest in the family was the new Vicar General, Fr Dunne. Mary Mayne remained a Protestant, but seemed to find more acceptance among the Irish Catholics than with those of her own religion. The children were brought up in their father’s faith. Patrick’s wealth, his lack of whole-hearted commitment to the Church, and his inclination to stray from its teaching meant there were plenty of reasons for Fr Dunne to call on them. His coming into their increasingly stressed life must have brought some comfort and strength to Mary.

  Fr Dunne was very different from the other Irish colonial priests they had known. He was a stocky man with a round face given character by a sharp nose and gentle hazel eyes. After an education in Rome, followed by some years as a teacher at St Lawrence’s School, Dublin, he had the strength and confidence to be tolerant and compassionate, and was also worldly-wise. He tried to solve his parishioners’ very human problems by employing a common sense that allowed him to interpret Church law to suit colonial circumstance. From fragments of letters that remain it seems clear he was aware of problems in the Mayne family, and extended what pastoral care he could. His worldly advice may well have been behind the sudden switch of fourteen-year-old Rosanna from day-student to boarder at All Hallows’ in 1864. The school was only four blocks away from their Queen Street home.

  For a man who was mentally and physically ill, 1864 was far too heavy a year for Patrick. If the cause of his death was porphyria, syphilis or cancer, by this time he was probably affected by it. Having been elected to the Council’s Finance Committee he was involved in preliminaries for the new Town Hall project and the cross-river bridge. There were interminable arguments over the urgently needed water supply, and the people were demanding a new hospital. True, the population had risen to 12,551 which meant increased rate money, but it was never enough to catch up with the town’s most elementary needs.

  In his business sphere he was shipping meat, supplying other butchers, and trade at his shop was brisk. There was his hides and tallow trade, and rents came in regularly from his many houses, business premises, paddocks and farmland. His directorship of No.3 Building Society provided a fair income, and the Q.S.N. Company was doing well enough for him to substantially increase his shareholding. He was known as an astute businessman with very substantial assets. The Bank of New South Wales had readily lent him money for further expansion, especially to stock ‘‘Rosevale’’ and purchase the pre-emptive square-mile homestead block. T.L. Murray-Prior gave him credit to buy his large grazing tract at Moggill. His personal interests were now so widely scattered, so diverse and demanding that they may have been the reason that throughout the year he missed at least one Council meeting a month.

  If one adds to his private workload the additional Council work, there may lie the answer as to why he now failed to keep a strict eye on all his financial affairs. That had not been his regime up until now. Perhaps business was so good that he missed the signs of downturn and believed a little wild financial gambling was nothing to worry about. But it is more likely, in such an astute man who had watched others fail by overreaching themselves, that by 1864 he was losing the concentration and tight grip that had directed the accumulation of his wealth.

  The pre-dawn tragedy that had hit the business heart of Brisbane months earlier, when a large tract of Queen Street West was incinerated, had not involved loss or damage to any Mayne property. However, the cost had been enormous to town trade, insurance companies, and owners of other premises, some of which were not insured. To cap it all, the cracks in the economy were beginning to show. Prices rose and credit was tightened. Unable to afford to rebuild, some licked their wounds and quietly went bankrupt, leaving their creditors to go into deeper debt. Others patched and painted and began trading again. For a while the scope of the financial damage was not clearly realised.

  In October, Patrick’s and other councillors’ agitation to improve the appearance and fire safety of Brisbane was taken up by newspaper proprietor and alderman T.B. Stephens. Mayne seconded the successful motion that the upper part of the town between Ann, Alice and Saul Streets be proclaimed ‘‘first-class’’. All new town buildings were to have external walls of brick.

  Seven weeks later, on Thursday, 1 December 1864, Brisbane’s worst-ever fire began in Stewart and Hemmant’s corner drapery and blazed out of control uphill until it had consumed twenty-two business premises, the new Music Hall, and some forty houses in the block bounded by Queen, Albert, Elizabeth, and George Streets. Lost in the blaze were four drapery stores, three hotels, three restaurants, two banks, two butcher shops, two saddleries, and others supplying groceries, fruit, confectionery, oysters and jewellery, as well as the auctioneer’s mart. Most of the destroyed wooden houses had been crowded behind the Queen Street shops and occupied by the poor. The fire was only prevented from sweeping along George Street when a group detached from the hundreds of voluntary fire-fighters was able to demolish Mr Pillow’s humpy to make a fire-break. The Brisbane Courier reported that 6,000 people gathered to watch the great fire. This time looters were held at bay by redcoats from the Twelfth Regiment with fixed bayonets, parading in front of the smouldering ruins as the conflagration ate its way through the rest of the unprotected block. At its height the flames and sparks roared so high that for some time the survival of the opposite side of Queen Street was in doubt, even though the buildings had been smothered in wet blankets.

  Mayne was not among the butchers who were burnt out, but his new brick shops, praised for their brilliant gas lighting, were in ruins. His tenant, Kosvitz the jeweller, had time to save only some of his stock. The Mayne account entries for repairs to burnt premises reveal that the Cafe Nationale and at least two of his houses also suffered. The Brisbane Courier, which gave much space to naming the leading townsfolk who were especially prominent in their exertions to save property, listed all the usual hierarchy of names, all aldermen or town businessmen, but made no mention of Patrick Mayne.

  Was this because of the continued non-acceptance of this very wealthy alderman as a social equal to those other townsfolk? He was too large a man to remain unnoticed, too aggressive and authoritarian to have done nothing. His own properties were at hazard and it is inconceivable that he and his staff were not helping. The Brisbane Courier’ s constant overlooking of Mayne when he could have had positive publicity must raise the possibility that there may have been an undercurrent of dark and shadowy suspicion about his link with the long-ago Cox murder, or even that of the German herdsman, Jacob Schelling. There may also have be
en an element of this in the anti-Mayne publicity when he was nominated to the Education Board in 1860. Dismembering and drowning feature in the many stories that still surround the family name.

  The fire cast a gloom over the whole community. Through Christmas and into the new year people were faced with a variety of shortages, including festive fare. Neither could they escape its daily reminder in the stark, charred black stubble of stumps and walls that spiked the wasted street. Not only the streets were ruined. Ruined businessmen either could not or were slow to pay their accounts and mortgages. Some had lost everything. There was no money to spare. Somewhere in all of this there was a tilt in the fine balance of the solvency of the speculating Patrick Mayne. For his last two large property purchases he had seriously over-borrowed. It took only two costly, unforeseen town fires and their aftermath to agitate the town bankers waiting beyond the widening economic chasm. He was now unable to meet their pressing requests to reduce his considerable debt. Some time earlier, he had sub-leased all but the homestead area of ‘‘Rosevale’’, relieving himself of the £80 a year Government rental. The land at Moggill was also rented to a farmer, but now there were no rents coming in from his burned town premises and no ready money to repair them.

  Most of the townsfolk regarded the big, colourful character Patrick Mayne as one of the colony’s success stories. He was still a relatively young man and had risen rapidly from rags to riches. Perhaps his deteriorating health had made him careless of the fact that other traders and customers owed him almost £4,000. Whatever his health problem may have been, the new year of 1865 saw him a sick man, heavily in debt to T.L. Murray-Prior and an impatient Bank of New South Wales, at a time of downturn in the economy. He was also struggling to maintain his role as an alderman in a quarrelsome, faction-ridden municipal Council. If he recognised the pressure, the stress must have worked against him.

  There were plenty of assets which could have been sold as a simple solution to his pressing debt. But it was not a good time to sell, and he was not about to have a fire-sale of his valuable properties. He believed that those who retained their assets won the game. His temporary shortage of money had to be traded away. Quite evidently his usual quick, clear mind was not grasping the seriousness of his own or the general economic position. At this stage he was having difficulty in coping with both his life and his business. Unfortunately, the page is missing from a record of his ten days’ hospitalisation in 1850, and the slot for ‘‘cause of death’’ is blank on his death certificate. The secret of his health problem remains.

  On 25 May 1865, Patrick went with the other aldermen to the Governor’s levee, but aldermen were not important enough to be presented to the Governor. He managed to attend the next Council meeting, which must have demanded real determination. Within days, his illness was such that he needed a full-time nurse in attendance. But that meeting dealt with the imminent opening of the first timber bridge to span the river at North Quay. He had long battled for its construction, and his role on the Finance Committee had given him some meetings of satisfying arguments. He was not destined to take part at the opening.

  If life for Patrick had become either a drift into a world of shadows and phantasms or a misery-ridden bed of pain, it must have been something of a nightmare for Mary. No one could doubt that her irrational and ill husband would be difficult to nurse. Moreover, on 4 March, her mother, who had arrived only two and a half years earlier, had died aged sixty-four. Patrick contracted to finance her funeral and burial in the Milton cemetery, but the account remained unpaid. Rosanna and Isaac, now two high-spirited and wilful teenagers, who both proved later to be damaged children, were not easy to control. In her travail Mary turned to the understanding and caring Fr Dunne.

  7

  Crisis After Crisis

  As the cold winds of July 1865 chilled the winter days, all those close to Patrick knew that he had little time to live. On top of Mary’s concern and grief she was faced with the bank’s pressing demands, the huge debt, five young children and a multiplicity of scattered business ventures about which she knew nothing, as well as the butcher shop, which she valiantly kept trading. It was clear that they would depend on this for their immediate livelihood. The two executors, George Raff and Joseph Darragh, were no doubt helpful with advice, but Raff was preoccupied with Parliament, his many involved business ventures, and the imminent foundering of the Queensland Steam Navigation Company, which had been waging an unproductive price-cutting war with the southern-based Australian Steam Navigation Company. Joe Darragh, less pressed by business, was at Kangaroo Point, on the other side of the unbridged river, not readily accessible. Fr Dunne, a good mathematician, had straightened out the Church accounts for Bishop Quinn, but he was no capitalist entrepreneur. His pastoral priorities were the care of the sick and dying and the education of the young. He had already helped Mary by drafting a letter for her requesting further education for young Isaac, who would soon finish at the Normal School.

  Dunne had liberal views on education, and in Queensland he worked hard to see that bright young Irish lads had an opportunity to further their education. In 1865 he established a Catholic Young Men’s Society with a heavy emphasis on education. Here he hoped to make up for the lads’ lack of access to a Grammar school. Some he prepared for the Civil Service examination. Young Andrew Thynne he prepared for law. The Maynes, too, would come under his watchful eye and influence.

  Dunne had long been disturbed by the apathy and defeatist attitude common to far too many young Irish migrants. They seemed content to remain on the bottom rung of colonial society. In Patrick and Mary Mayne he responded to the positiveness and energy that shone through their rough and sometimes disordered behaviour. In the face of Patrick’s imminent early death, it was characteristic of Dunne to want to ensure that the tragedy did not result in the wasted potential of their capable, bright children. He had a good ally in Mary.

  At some point in the first week of August, while Patrick was still lucid, a decision was made to include Mary as a trustee and executor of his estate. The codicil, giving her equal power and authority with Raff and Darragh, was unusual for the times. Wives had little standing in the community; any status they had was derived from that of their husbands. Business affairs were considered to be far beyond their ability. The decision to include Mary suggests that she had already demonstrated that she was a capable and responsible woman. The codicil seems to have been drawn up in great haste. It was not dated, and six weeks later its legality was questioned in the court. Patrick’s signature, which on his will drawn up in February 1858 was large and clear, written in a firm sure hand, was now shaky and unsure, difficult to recognise as his. But there was no difficulty in proving its legality. When the matter came to court on 22 September 1865, Robert Cribb, whose honesty was regarded as beyond doubt, tendered a letter confirming that he had witnessed the drawing up and signing of the codicil on 7 August, ten days before Patrick died. A second confirming letter was tendered by the solicitors’ clerk, Walter Barber. The calling in of Cribb, a Queen Street businessman who was not a friend, to witness such a document, suggests something of the haste with which the change was made. It also indicates that several people as well as Dr Hugh Bell, Fr Dunne, the nurse, family, and maid visited the sick room during those last two weeks. The solicitor and Raff and Darragh were there, and other friends may also have made a last farewell. Any one of those could have overheard a rambling or delirious Patrick and subsequently disclose his deathbed confession to murder, which became public property some days before he died.

  Anyone who had ever been harangued by hellfire preachers about the plight of the unrepentant sinner brought to divine justice and the horrific eternal hell of the damned might have shared Patrick’s terrible fear. He had a few despairing weeks to ponder on his future damnation; weeks when he was suspended agonisingly between the successful man he had built himself up to be and the murderer about to face his God. Now, shrunk in illness, with nothing left, not even his siz
e to intimidate his terror, he desperately wanted salvation.

  The story was out. Patrick Mayne had committed a murder and the wrong man had been hanged for it. The town knew of it several days before he died on 17 August. The community belief was powerful and the shame and misery within the family must have shafted into their grief. The strength of Mary Mayne stands out like a beacon. The backlash in the minds of the children can only be imagined. In her boarding school, Rosanna would have nursed her pain alone, without the consoling comfort of family mealtime discussion, anger and questions to release the pent-up stress. The two eldest boys would have faced taunts and whispers, and stony eyes that followed them as they walked to school.

  Mayne’s confession to the murder in 1848 of Robert Cox created a surging buzz of excitement and anticipation. The public perceived that Patrick was a murderer, but most of the townsfolk had arrived after 1850; they had never heard of Robert Cox and William Fyfe. It was the old hands such as Henry Stuart Russell, Thomas Dowse, J.J. Knight, William Sutton and the Petries who remembered the case. Years later, without mentioning Mayne’s name, Russell and Knight wrote of the confession in their memoirs; and Dowse, who had been on the grand jury which condemned Fyfe, made a pointed non-mention in one of his ‘‘Old Tom’’ articles in the Queenslander. Naming the traders in Queen Street, he wrote of Mayne’s shop: ‘‘…occupied by another, who for prudence sake, I decline to name.’’ To this day, the connection between Mayne and the murdered Robert Cox has disappeared. Among historians, the Cox case is occasionally mentioned as having an unsatisfactory finding. Mayne’s name was omitted from the press reports at the time. He was not suggested as a suspect. Instead, the name of Mayne, without specifying which member of the family, is constantly linked with a series of disconnected, bizarre but fictional murders.

  This came about because generally the townsfolk let their imaginations embroider the confession, and handed down to their children and grandchildren their own exciting versions of what happened. No one spoke out publicly about the confession. The papers could not carry it. The story remained intriguing gossip. In an isolated colonial town where the only events that disturbed the general boredom were accidents, crime and hangings (which could be counted on to draw a big crowd of whites and Aborigines), Patrick Mayne’s funeral, held on a Sunday, became an EVENT.