The Mayne Inheritance Page 4

  Within months of opening his shop he was a family man, father of Rosanna, and had money in his pocket. Their daughter had been born in Queen Street on 30 January 1850. Immediately he began living up to his new status. Now it was no cocky but unimportant slaughterman who joined his uproarious friends at the hotel, but an assertive Queen Street butcher in expansive mode who displayed his new prosperity and gained popularity by readily going surety for three Irish publicans. This was a smart business move; for many years he continued to go surety for publicans at licence renewal time. The hotels all had dining rooms that served meat, so he had an assured trade. His enthusiasm to show himself as a big fellow dropped him into an early trap, however, when he went surety for the forger James Field. Patrick’s money was forfeited when Field absconded. And Mayne was not quite so enthusiastic about donating to worthy causes. He made only an average donation to support the stipend of Fr Hanley and gave ten shillings and sixpence to the Hospital Fund. Late in 1851, he was to enter that hospital for ten days, but that page in the records is missing and there is no indication of his health problem.

  Less than a year after he opened his shop he was summoned to court in the first of a long series of misdemeanours that brought him into conflict with the law. Despite his undoubted desire to be an important man of business, reports in the Moreton Bay Courier underline the fact that throughout his short life he had little regard for the law and seemed sometimes to believe that what he wanted, he could have. There are occasional indications that a dark and stronger mind-force took control.

  On this first occasion, he had sighted and taken home a pig which had been sold by another Queen Street trader, Robert Cribb, to Richard Sexton of Kangaroo Point. In a district where ownership of wandering stock was frequently disputed, owners of pigs usually made their identifying mark on one ear of the animal. When Sexton’s servant and Cribb’s son were searching for the pig and eventually identified it as it slumbered in Mayne’s backyard, Patrick’s instant reaction was brute force. Strong and fit from years of handling heavy animals, he easily gave a savage beating to the two young men and forced them from his yard. The assault was proven and he was fined £2.10.6d. Five weeks later he was back in court on a similar charge.

  Although 1850 was a good year with expanding trade, Patrick Mayne could not, so early in his business venture, have had much surplus money for his new, expansive lifestyle. It is possible that having established his shop and too readily shown some largess to suit the idea of his new position, he was for a time a little short of money. One of several puzzling incidents occurred eighteen months after he bought his business.

  His friend Mathew Stewart was now doing well as a publican at the only North Brisbane two-storied hotel, the Donnybrook, on the opposite side of Queen Street. At two o’clock one chilly Sunday morning, Stewart was awakened by a noise at his bedroom window. His cash-box had gone from the bedside table, the window was wide open and the thief had fled to the yard by a ladder used as a fire-escape, which he had then removed. At an outcry from Stewart, Patrick Mayne suddenly appeared and joined him in the search for the thief. They found only the dropped cash-box, still with its contents of £27. The Moreton Bay Courier noted that the thief doubtless expected a much larger sum which was known to be in the hotel. The reporter made much of Mayne’s sudden appearance but gave no explanation for it. What remains unexplained is how Patrick appeared so conveniently on the scene at 2a.m. Mary, six months into her second pregnancy, was in bed at the back of their shop some distance away. On that night was Mayne sleeping at the hotel in the same street as his shop, or simply passing by?

  When business was slow, one of the pleasant tasks of shopkeeping was to stand at the front and chat to passersby, at the same time noting who was in town and the amount of trade being done elsewhere. It was on such an occasion that Patrick again crossed swords with the law. In the course of duty, Constable Monsell was escorting an obstreperous drunk past the butcher’s shop to the watch-house when he was suddenly and forcefully attacked by Mayne. In court, Patrick declared that he did not approve of Constable Monsell’s actions.

  Mary Mayne was as quick to attack as her husband. When Mrs Sheehan, the neighbouring publican’s wife and her male servant attempted to retrieve their hen and chickens, which Mary had captured and carefully trussed up with string in Mayne’s backyard, the all-in brawl ended in court. Screaming threats to kill, Mary rushed at Mrs Sheehan with a fence paling, while Patrick, with the bullying tactics of the larger and stronger man, grabbed the Sheehans’ terrified servant by the hair. Holding him up, he enquired tauntingly: ‘‘Now what was the matter?’’ The ‘‘Chicken Hash’’ as the paper reported it, came only three weeks after Patrick’s attack on Constable Monsell. Bullying, sometimes backed up by the use of his whip, seems to have been one of Mayne’s ego-boosters. In the early sixties he was pilloried in the press for this standover behaviour.

  In his earlier brush with the law over the misappropriation of Sexton’s pig, he had considered that even though the crime was his, his home with its yard was his castle, not to be violated. But he did not extend that concept to other people. In 1855, when he asserted that another Queen Street butcher, John Wilson, had stolen eight of his pigs, he stormed into Wilson’s shop to inspect the evidence and tried to take the pig carcases back to his shop. Both men were now prosperous butchers, with neighbouring poorly-fenced stockyards at Breakfast Creek. It was not unusual for disputes over pigs to arise. Once again, Mayne was out of luck. The carcases he claimed were minus their identifying ears. He lost the case. More than once he was accused of stealing other people’s stock, but, in fairness to him, a widespread attitude to livestock seemed to be: ‘‘claim what you can get away with.’’ Both butchers admitted that the fence was not pig-proof, and their shepherds testified that the animals sometimes became mixed. The record shows that Mayne was often careless about the confinement of his animals, and was fined several times for allowing his pigs to stray into the street.

  In his many other court appearances he was fined £10 for trying to intimidate a witness; fined for using bad language; and again charged with assaulting a man in the street. This time it was Thomas Holland who was walking past his shop. A fine of £10 to a pound-a-week worker may have been a deterrent, but the moneyed Mayne displayed an air of insouciance as he paid the fine in cash, on the spot. When Martin Fletcher was on trial for forging and uttering, Mayne, who proudly informed the court that he was a butcher, landed proprietor and owner of the Lord Raglan Hotel, was accused of ‘‘acting in concert’’ with his hotel’s publican as a witness for the prosecution. The judge decided their accusation was trumpery and threw out the case. It was another occasion when Mayne had no conscience about implicating an innocent man.

  In the rough colonial culture of the 1850s, this continued flouting of law and order may have made him appear, in some eyes, something of a folk hero. For the gregarious Patrick it was important to be a big fellow; fear of losing that identity would ensure his continued larrikinism. Even the arrival of six children over that decade and the death of one of them, made no impact on what he saw as acceptable behaviour. Larrikinism has a boundary that stops short of extremes of human behaviour; in Patrick, an element of irrationality smudged that boundary. At times it seemed as though his consciousness of other people’s feelings was nonexistent.

  After he won public office in 1859 and served with some of the town’s respected businessmen on the first municipal council, his openly cavalier attitude to the law did not seem to change. Ten months after winning office, he was convicted of horsewhipping an intoxicated William Taylor who entered his shop, called him ‘‘Paddy’’ and gave him cheek. If Patrick thought his civic dignity was at stake, he had two assistant butchers behind the counter who could have escorted the drunk away. Instead, their employer savagely slashed at Taylor’s head and shoulders six or seven times with his whip, then closed in and attacked him with its butt, inflicting more lacerations. He was fined what seemed to be the customar
y amount for such behaviour: forty shillings, plus ten shillings and sixpence costs.

  It was always a different story when Patrick believed he was wronged. He was quick to charge indentured employees who absconded, and to see they received three months’ hard labour. And he was not beyond withholding a worker’s wages if it suited him. In 1846, as a slaughterman for Campbell, Patrick had twice taken his bankrupt employer to court for back wages. Yet he had no sympathy for his own employees, trying to survive with little pay. Nor did he have the excuse of trading problems or bankruptcy when he failed to pay the German migrant Heinrich Bowger for a year’s work in 1858. On the contrary—he was a very wealthy man, regularly purchasing tracts of land in the town and outlying areas. Bowger, who was under bond to be employed by anyone who paid his fare to Australia, had accepted Mayne’s offer of £30 a year with rations. A shepherd’s wage was £40 a year with rations; the balance of Bowger’s wage was to be forfeited in repayment of his fare. He won his case against Mayne, who had paid him only £14.7.6d, less than six months’ wages, for twelve months’ work.

  In the young colony, wealth, mostly invested in property, was the indicator of social worth and success. Mayne had invested his accumulated wealth in property, and the local lads may have applied that measure of social worth to him. But those who administered the law were well aware of his lawless reputation and made no concessions. The wording of press reports of his misdemeanours occasionally suggests that the editor of the local newspaper regarded him more as one of the likely lads, a tearaway rather than a civic-minded, respected citizen to which one of Patrick’s personae aspired. But it must be emphasised that if anyone other than Patrick himself harboured inside knowledge of his deepest secret, there is no evidence that the press or the general public ever suspected his involvement in the Cox murder.

  In the 1850s it was not just the accumulation of land that stirred the commercial pulse of the colonists. The excitement of the Californian gold rush, and the discovery of gold by Edward Hargreaves in 1851 at Bathurst, New South Wales, roused visions of quick riches amongst Australians. People dreamed of a bonanza. The newspapers and the people talked GOLD. In Moreton Bay it was rumoured to have been found in the Taylor Range at the edge of settlement, as well as on the Darling Downs, and hopeful prospectors panned the local creeks. Some local men had shipped off to the Californian diggings; now Brisbane’s traders were concerned that not only would new immigrants prefer to go where gold had been discovered, but that Brisbane would lose many of her precious few citizens to the hunt for quick wealth. These business men, fearing financial loss (and themselves not immune to gold fever) set aside their trading rivalries and united to seek a profitable solution. On 27 June 1851, a North Brisbane group gathered in John Richardson’s storehouse and pooled their money to offer a reward to a discoverer of gold in their trading area, the northern district of Stanley, or on the Darling Downs. There were enough glittering visions for the handful of men to contribute £900.15.0d., but they were cautious enough to limit the offer to the next four months. Donations ranged as high as £50, a year’s salary for many workers. Patrick’s substantial £20 was well up with the majority. In fact, despite the traders’ qualms about a deserting workforce, not a great many people were motivated to leave the safe huddle of the settlement and brave the hazards of snakes, thirst, and unfriendly Aborigines that might await any greenhorn prospector in the bush.

  The population of Brisbane had doubled in the six years since Patrick arrived; two-thirds of the 2,500 settlers were his Irish countrymen. There were new hotels serving meals to travellers and visiting squatters, and the ratio of women to men had improved so the increase in marriages meant there were now a few hundred more homes and families to be supplied with meat. Patrick Mayne’s world was comfortable, the future promising. He had no money worries, his virility was obvious (Mary was pregnant again), and in his brushes with the law he could afford its fines and show he was not someone to be pushed around. In this world, money in the pocket did not confer status unless people knew you had it. Other than land there was precious little to spend money on in order to indicate success, but land was what Patrick wanted. In his twenty-six years of life in Ireland and the colony, he saw that those who owned land were the important ones. They gave the orders, lived in large houses and collected the rents. Land not only gave status, it was negotiable in times of need. It was also quite profitable when sold to incoming migrants.

  Mayne’s land accumulation began in August 1851, when he purchased the first allotments in what would become a holding of fifty to sixty different areas of Moreton Bay, totalling in excess of 1,700 acres. More than half his land lay in what is now the Brisbane area. This does not include his short-term trading in town shops and houses, neither does it include the Mayne family’s twentieth-century gift of land to the University of Queensland for the St Lucia campus. That gift was money. No Maynes at any time owned that land.

  Patrick began with two choice allotments in Queen Street; within three years he owned land in Elizabeth, Creek and Margaret Streets and at North Quay, as well as large areas of scrubland at Heussler Terrace and Milton, and thirty-five well-wooded acres facing Breakfast Creek, the area which is now Mayne Junction. In the next two confident years before the 1857 slump, he acquired land in Edward Street, and added eight acres to his paddocks at Breakfast Creek. He also bought some of the green hills of Wickham Terrace, where there began a trend for the wealthier to build; and a five-acre tract across the river adjoining the South Brisbane reserve (between Vulture, Stanley and Merton Streets). In the town he bought two hotels, the Sawyers Arms and the Lord Raglan. When the economy picked up in 1858 he began buying again, this time more land fringing the straggling streets of the settled town area, then west from its North Quay boundary towards Milton, taking in what is now the Lang Park area.

  The sales of Crown land in Moreton Bay were eagerly awaited, and except in times of economic slump, the allotments were rarely passed in. Much of the land was scrub or semi-bush and it was purchased for resale for housing or rented for agricultural use. In the boom years large profits were made, but for the small speculators who could not afford to hold on during the periodic economic slumps, land investment was a risky gamble. The dealings of the big speculators were normally a passport to town eminence and Darby McGrath and Patrick Mayne were among the big buyers. Again and again the same names are listed as regular buyers, among them the town’s leading businessmen, such people as Robert Cribb, Ambrose Eldridge, T.B. Stephens, George Raff, John Markwell and George Edmonstone. With the exception of the uneducated Mayne and McGrath they were men of lower middle-class backgrounds and some education; except for Markwell and McGrath, they were all to play a role in colonial and local government.

  Despite their wealth, the community standing of Mayne and McGrath depended to some extent on the social solidarity of the large Irish population. Among the more staid, better educated Scottish and English townsfolk, who were less than impressed by Mayne’s public behaviour and the McGrath convict connections, there was considerable social reticence. To them Mayne always remained merely a business acquaintance. He earnestly aspired to be, and became known as a man of the town, but he failed to achieve acceptance as an equal. This must have left the private Mayne struggling with a sense of alienation and frustration. Astute as his mind was for cunning action and business planning, there was a mental block which meant that he continued to behave in the same anti-social way; he expected that wealth alone was sufficient to bring him social success.

  In 1859, Patrick Mayne was one of the considerably landrich men who successfully stood for the first municipal elections. In that year the Collector of Customs, W.A. Duncan, moved to Sydney and Mayne purchased ‘‘Dara’’, his cottage at the edge of semi-bushland on Duncan’s Hill (Centenary Place). A typical first settler’s house, it was primitive but liveable, with a flat roof and wattle-and-daub walls propped up by hardwood joists fixed against the outer walls. Its real value rested in the fact that i
ts hillside commanded a vista along both Queen and Adelaide Streets. It was one of Patrick’s rental properties, and in 1861 the Catholic Bishop, James Quinn, became his tenant. Two years later, as part of his continual buying and selling at a good profit, Mayne sold it to the Church. In these years as an alderman he bought another eighteen acres in the Lang Park area, several allotments at Sandgate, a large section of Kelvin Grove and two town allotments at Lytton. Following James Toohey’s lead, he also bought 140 acres at Yeerongpilly. Some of the money to fund these land purchases came from the rents paid on his recent investments in buildings. He acquired the Brisbane, British Empire and Royal Exchange hotels, all rented to publicans. Rents also came from his Cafe Nationale and shops and houses in Queen, Edward, Leichhardt, Albert, and Adelaide Streets, as well as houses in William and Creek Streets, slaughter yards at Enoggera, and the paddocks at Elizabeth Street, Moggill, and Breakfast Creek. A few of these properties were mortgaged, but as Brisbane’s population doubled from 6,051 in 1861 to 12,551 in 1864, he shared the general confidence that both his trade and his future rents were secure. There was also a widespread belief that before long gold would be found to take care of the future.