The Mayne Inheritance

by Rosamond Siemon

  Head high, Mary spared no expense. The undertaker’s account for £97.11.0 was well over twice the cost of her mother’s funeral, which, only months earlier, had been a fitting farewell reflecting the wealth of the Maynes. Her husband had been a public figure; many civic dignitaries would attend. They did; but she underestimated the power and rapid spread of flying rumour. On the morning of the funeral the buzz of the throng in Queen Street must have seemed daunting to Mary and her sister-in-law, Ann. The Brisbane Courier (21 August 1865) estimated that 4,000 men and women were crammed outside the Mayne house waiting for the hearse to move off. Along the route, groups of one to three hundred people waited at vantage points for a better view.

  As Irishwomen, Mary and Ann knew that they were watching for confirmation of the flying rumours. There was a strong belief in Irish folklore that when a murderer dies, the horses of his hearse will refuse to move it. Stories still abound that the horses of Mayne’s hearse would not move until they were thoroughly whipped. The poet, Gwen Harwood heard the story and wrote of it in 1943. In another version, the horses baulked at the entrance to the Roman Catholic cemetery at Milton and refused to go in until they were forced. Whether or not the spectators’ macabre curiosity was satisfied, they would have been rewarded with the longest funeral procession that Brisbane had seen. There were many private coaches to carry all the aldermen and the large number of leading businessmen, and every vehicle plying for hire in the town was pressed into service. Behind them came some hundred horsemen and a large number of people on foot. The Brisbane Courier reported the length of the procession as extending from the hospital in George Street to the gaol at Petrie Terrace. Whatever his knowledge of events and whatever his thoughts, the compassionate Fr Robert Dunne kept his own counsel as he buried forty-one-year-old Patrick beside his baby daughter, Evelina Selina who had died eleven years earlier.

  The continuing care and friendship offered by Fr Dunne was unaffected by the fact that Patrick left the Church not one penny. The extent of his previous largess had been limited to a £50 donation some time earlier for Bishop Quinn’s Cathedral Fund. It would have been in keeping with Church practice for the visiting priest to try to ensure some benefit from Patrick; at that time he believed him to be a very wealthy man. An appropriate time would have been when the codicil was added ten days before Patrick died, but Dunne took no advantage of his ill and frightened parishioner.

  Had anyone questioned Patrick’s mental state during his tempestuous life, the revelations about the Cox murder would have offered some confirmation that he had a problem. Early this century, Dr James Mayne told Dr Lilian Cooper that there were three generations of madness in his family. This must have included one of his grandparents. If Patrick had kept this knowledge from Mary, at the time of his confession his sister Ann or his cousin, Joseph Darragh, may have revealed it. Darragh’s mother Ann and Patrick’s mother Rose had been the O’Neil sisters at Cookstown, Ireland.

  The far-reaching result of Patrick’s confession and the discussions about his mental instability was some sort of family decision that none of the children should marry. Patrick’s will of 1858 had been drawn up in the belief that his children would marry and he allowed for the possibility of grandchildren. Dame Rumour still has it that the priest who heard the confession forced a non-marrying rule on the family before he consented to Patrick’s burial in hallowed ground. Dame Rumour did not look at the facts. Fr Dunne had no such legal authority, and if he had made such a proviso, there was no way of long-term enforcement. In later years, in his scattered bush parish on the Darling Downs (1868–81), the compassionate priest was known to have pardoned penitents for all the sins of their past life, even the most serious transgressions, where the granting of absolution is usually the preserve of a bishop or pope. There is no reason to believe that in this case he imposed conditions on the children of the penitent Patrick before granting him absolution. There is more reason to believe that such a worldly-wise priest would know enough about his parishioners to recognise some mental instability and allow commonsense to prevail over ecclesiastical law.

  There is also reason to believe that this very humane man, whose record shows that he worked hard to solve the human problems of his colonial flock, would have discussed that problem with the attending doctor and then talked over the prospects of the family’s future with Mary. It is possible that both of them suspected the beginnings of a problem with Rosanna. Dunne would undoubtedly have backed Mary in convincing her children of a sensible decision. The two eldest were well into puberty, old enough and intelligent enough to take part in any family discussion. Assuming that Mary was ignorant of the murder until Patrick’s confession, she would have been horrified by her recently acquired knowledge and saddened by grief and malicious whispers; but she was strong enough to understand and act on what she considered best for her family. She was a Protestant; Father Dunne was a valuable friend and counsellor; she was capable of issuing the advice not to marry and hoping that her children would comply.

  The actual crime and the names of the two victims, Cox and Fyfe, unknown to most, were forgotten quite early. The name of Patrick Mayne, the murderer, was not forgotten. Had any of the children ever contemplated marriage, the wild distorted versions of his many supposed crimes that exist to this day were waiting to engulf them. They grew up painfully aware of that circumstance.

  For Mary, those troubled August days were rapidly overtaken by a different despair. She was faced with bequests totalling £400 for Patrick’s brother and three sisters, wages to be paid to thirteen men, two girls and the nurse; burned and damaged buildings still needing costly repairs so they could again earn rent, and a mountain of debts and some dishonoured cheques which confirmed the grim prospect of bankruptcy. There was £700.12.6d. in the bank and £20,258.5.11d. owing to other people. The largest debt was to the Bank of New South Wales. It had been negotiated by Patrick in 1860 at the high interest rate of 13 per cent and was secured by the bank holding the title deeds of several choice pieces of his real estate. McLean and Best were owed £2,000 for cattle, and £1,500 was still unpaid on Moggill farm. The interest payments alone were crippling.

  Mary had kept things going through the last months of her husband’s illness, but what lay ahead was another matter. Neither she nor Patrick had ever been the type to remain unnoticed. Like him, she was quite capable of sending gossips packing with a flea in their ear. Now her situation was different. She was very much in the public eye, an object of more serious public speculation. It would have been easy for an uneducated woman in mid-life with all her domestic responsibilities to sell sufficient property to pay the debts and find a nice little house in the suburbs. She stood to inherit £300 a year; all the rest was for the children. If the end result of selling meant that her money was reduced, she would not have been wealthy but she would have been very comfortably off, with sufficient money to educate her five children and a fair inheritance preserved for their adult years.

  The alternative was years of hard work, both mental and physical, to keep things going on a more businesslike and long-term basis. She was untrained and would need to learn rapidly how to cope with accounts and workmen, tenants of farms and buildings, contractors and bankers—people who had contempt for women such as she. The tiger in Mary had no intention of failing her cubs. Life with Patrick had accustomed her to living with a high degree of uncertainty; she had learned to tolerate the unfamiliar. She rearranged her life and, with valuable advice from the experienced Raff and Darragh, began what turned out to be a bigger struggle than any of them could have anticipated.

  It was not just a matter of learning how Patrick had done things. In 1866, the year following his death, business confidence gave way to alarm about the future. When some of the London banks collapsed, the waves of failure swept across Australia. The Bank of Queensland closed in July 1866. This was followed by the failure of the Queensland Steam Navigation Company in which Patrick had invested heavily. His own financial collapse had been a
forerunner to several high-flyers’ insolvencies. Even Bishop Quinn struggled under a debt of some £10,000, also borrowed at a high rate, much of it to purchase the mansion ‘‘Adderton’’ for a convent.

  Among the middle-class investors and businessmen claimed by insolvency were five aldermen. Unpaid in their civic role, they had to resign their seats to salvage what was left in the worsening economic climate. Gold fever had beguiled many men into believing that a bonanza would vindicate their property gamble. Instead, as unemployment grew, land values dropped. At a time when new bright gas lights were being installed in Brisbane town, business was becoming dimmed everywhere. All traders found their takings severely reduced.

  It was expected that Mary would sell enough of their real estate to meet the debt. Had she done so in those depression years, sales at bargain prices would have materially diminished the interests of the inheritors, her children. Reluctantly she faced the fact that Rosevale Station, at least two days’ ride distant, three days with a dray, was too far away for her to supervise. It had to be let go early and cheaply. She sold it to Morts for £2,321.14.9d. and the stock for another £1,500, and reduced the debt to the bank. In 1868, when the troubled bank decided to foreclose, Mary and her co-trustees applied to the Supreme Court to see if she had the power under Patrick’s will to raise a mortgage on enough of the properties to discharge all of his debt. Interest rates had dropped to considerably less than the 13 per cent they were paying to the bank; a new mortgage seemed a reasonable financial solution to satisfy all parties. The Chief Justice, His Honour Mr James Cockle, consented to their request, and the Anglican Bishop of Brisbane, E.W. Tufnell, came to her aid, lending her £4,000 at an interest of 3 3/4 per cent. Five months later, on 26 April 1869, Mary’s letter to the Court reads:

  As executrix, I have taken the entire management of the administration of the said estate and I did, out of my own funds and other moneys which I have borrowed from time to time, pay off and discharge the debts due, and that the balance of accounts is now due to me by the estate of the said Patrick Mayne for and on account of moneys paid by me to the creditors.

  Those five months had seen a new legal setback. George Raff was having troubles. He worked some sixty to a hundred Melanesians on his plantation ‘‘Morayfield’’ at Caboolture, and was an active defender of the Kanaka labour system, against the growing moral concern of what some, especially the clergy, called slave labour. Although a number of Raff’s Kanakas absconded and he took sixteen of them to court, he was investigated, cleared, and declared a good employer. He was influential but unpopular. The failure of the Q.S.N. Company was time-consuming and the prolonged political controversy over the Kanakas was damaging to his political career. When Mary was given permission to mortgage more property to try to trade the estate out of debt, Raff decided to withdraw as an executor and trustee for the Mayne children. He needed time and energy to shore up his finances, popularity, and political chances.

  The Maynes had never been socially accepted. The murky stories about Patrick were always high on the gossip list, and finding a reputable replacement who would shoulder considerable responsibility was difficult. In February 1869 the surprise acceptance was that of John Petrie, civic-minded, but no friend of the Maynes. It is tempting to think that his acceptance was a tribute to Mary’s ability to cope; but more likely the initiator was the new mortgagee, Bishop Tufnell who, with his own building plans for the future, would gain some leverage with John Petrie and his contracting firm.

  For a short period Mary thought she could now live as a private person away from the stress and shame. She left her employees to continue the smooth running of the shop and took the children to live at Sandgate, by now a fashionable holiday area for moneyed people. James’ joyous memories of running barefoot in the sand and of it being ‘‘the happiest time of his life’’ are all that is known of that time. No doubt for the seven-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister, the warmth of their mother’s care and attention and the freedom of a bigger playground than dung-strewn, dusty Queen Street made that time more precious. But Mary found that making frequent long carriage rides from Sandgate to attend to business in town was impractical and they returned to Queen Street.

  By 1874 prices were on the rise again. After seven years of being a butcher, Mary had sold the business in 1872. Now was a good time to think about shedding a little more property in order to make a large dint in the remaining debt. With no more need for cattleyards and shepherds at the Mayne estate, she sold part of that land, an allotment in Leichhardt Street and another in William Street for £4,446.6.0. The rest of the estate was intact. The family could afford to relax a little. Rosanna, now twenty-five and about to enter a convent, was able to draw £500 as an advance from her share of the estate.

  Apart from the neatly compiled statements rendered to the Court, there is nothing else to tell us of the tremendous effort made by the former servant girl to save the fortune which ultimately paid for both the St Lucia site and the Moggill Farm of the University of Queensland, and which still provides continuous funds for its Faculty of Medicine. In December 1879, fourteen years after Patrick died, the last account was fully paid and the estate cleared. There is nothing to tell us if Mary attacked her formidable task with the same belligerence that saw her tie up her neighbour’s chickens and defend her action with a fence post—or whether, fifteen years after that imbroglio, she had become a mature negotiator. To keep going for fourteen vigilant years after Patrick’s death to trade away the debt would have demanded all her determination and zealous enthusiasm. It may be that long experience of coping with Patrick’s exaggerated mood changes had taught her strategies for success. Of her personal life in that time, there are only two clues: repairs to a house at Sandgate in which we know she holidayed with the children for a short time, and a bill for £15 for sherry. Both are from 1866; both probably eased the stress so that she could carry on.

  8

  Out of the Ashes

  It is fair to say that Patrick’s widow, Mary McIntosh Mayne, was the unsung hero of the family, the woman whose efforts the ultimate beneficiary, the University of Queensland, might recognise. She inherited no property; the only tangible remnant of her life is a neat, regular signature on her will and on the accounts rendered to the Court at the end of her long labour to save the estate. Not even a photograph of her exists. If James and Mary were any indication, her children were relatively handsome, but whether she is reflected in their strong faces and wide-set eyes, we cannot know.

  Buoyed up with news of Patrick’s success in Australia, his sister Rosa, to whom he had left £100, decided to try her luck in Brisbane. In the early 1840s she had left County Tyrone for New York, married Joseph Mooney and borne several children. The family’s arrival in 1866 was probably at Mary’s suggestion; soon the Mooneys became licensees paying rent to the Mayne estate for the Royal Exchange Hotel at the corner of Albert and Elizabeth Streets. It is doubtful whether the two families could have maintained more than a kin relationship, for when Joseph died in 1871, Rosa continued to rent and run the hotel while raising their seven children. She would have had as little time for social life as the fully occupied Mary. What Rosa did display was the same strength and drive as that of her brother, Patrick. Both Patrick’s sisters, Ann and Rosa, were close enough to Mary to witness her signature on her will, but the young Mooneys’ lives took different paths from that of their wealthy and well-educated cousins. Aunt Ann Mayne, for whom Mary, and then her children, always assumed a responsibility, probably maintained the family contact. For forty-three years she lived as a helpful and welcome member in the Mayne household, but after her death the Mooneys do not appear to have been among the visitors to ‘‘Moorlands’’.

  Four of Mary’s children, like their parents, were achievers. Rosanna at All Hallows’ was doing very well, particularly in music and French. In 1866 the only further education available for teenage boys came from one of about two dozen townsfolk with varying standards of education
who advertised classes in their homes for a shilling a week. The Reverend B.G. Shaw’s Collegiate School, conducted in his home ‘‘Alexandra’’ on Wickham Terrace, was selected for Isaac; here he eventually passed an examination which led to employment as a clerk with Queen Street solicitor Thomas Bunton. Fr Dunne’s protective eye was never far away from the Mayne children, and his night school for boys no doubt also contributed to Isaac’s further education so that he was able to be articled to Bunton in 1871. The bright but younger William and James were yet to prove themselves.

  A factor in the shaping of Rosanna’s life was the extension of the work of the Sisters of Mercy to the Darling Downs. The 1860s depression years had seen migrants and labourers moving west in search of a better life on the fertile western plains, their move made easier by the opening of the Ipswich to Toowoomba railway line in 1867. Among them were a large number of Bishop Quinn’s migrants whom he sponsored under his Queensland Immigration Society. They began filling the open spaces in the Toowoomba district. It was the largest settled area west of the ranges and its 3,000 settlers were in need of a permanent service for their religious life, and education for their children.

  Fr Dunne, who had frequent differences with his authoritarian bishop, James Quinn, was despatched west to succour and guide Toowoomba’s largely Irish and German Catholic population. His going was a loss to Mary Mayne; while she struggled to run the butchery and worried about the large debt, he had kept an eye on Rosanna, who was boarding at All Hallows’ convent. The girl was high-spirited, with rapid changes of mood; with other promising senior students she was training as a pupil-teacher, but both Dunne and Mary knew she had ideas of becoming a nun. Dunne was also aware of the strains caused by the hard life, long hours and poor food, which were the lot of the pioneering Sisters of Mercy. They accepted their life but too much was expected of them; already the ranks of the younger nuns were being depleted by a high death rate from tuberculosis and exhaustion. Dunne’s own sister in Ireland had succumbed to what we would now see as overwork and neglect by her superiors. He was also acutely aware that in the cloistered life of Brisbane, as in any community of strong-minded people, there were clashes of personalities which could be unsettling to the most vulnerable in the community. A current problem was a difference of view between the Bishop and some of the Sisters of Mercy. There were, in fact, pro-and anti-Quinn factions; in 1868, this had resulted in a rebellion by two sisters who had walked out and boarded a ship for Sydney.