4
Consolidating an Empire
There was a great deal more to Patrick Mayne than barbaric behaviour and the accumulation of property. He had an innate ability to plan meticulously for long-term action and not deviate from his decision. Despite all the cunning and savagery of the Cox murder, it clearly reveals this ability. Once Patrick crossed the poverty line and stepped into a more satisfying world where he was a man of business, his still untutored mind channelled its instinctive ability to make wise choices for long-term business success. Where others made hope a paradigm for their future, Patrick made use of vitality, action and single-mindedness. His negative, darker, satanic self, which unwisely exploded with savage aggression to minor irritations was not subdued, but he seemed able to separate it from his world of business, where he remained mentally in control. He had decisive ideas to increase his own wealth and his community standing and to benefit the town. Despite burdening himself with a large number of civic and private projects, he retained for some years the determination and concentration to steer them to successful conclusions.
In the first four years as shop owner and man of property, he consolidated rapidly. Young Rosanna, and Isaac (born on 14 January 1852), both named for Patrick’s parents, played in and out of the shop and the backyard. Mary was pregnant again, and although the Maynes were considered a bit too rough to be on the visiting lists of most of the other Queen Street traders, Patrick had established himself as a man who could move with the times and afford to keep up with the best. By 1853 the worst of the prevailing depression was over. There was a rising real estate market, and changes in Queen Street reflected confidence in the future of the area. Robert Cribb began building his new brick drapery establishment, Moreton House, with its Sydney-style fashionable plate-glass windows. Patrick followed suit, but planned differently. He began with a new large brick home across the road from his shop, near the Edward Street corner of Queen Street. Both Cribb’s and Mayne’s modern premises were much admired, but Patrick was only beginning. He added an adjoining brick shop. In November 1853, just after their second daughter, Evelina Selina was born the complete move was made and he proudly advertised his butchery’s new location. A block away at his recently purchased yard at the corner of Elizabeth and Albert Streets, he could slaughter his stock at sundown, hang it overnight and quarter it early; even in the hottest summer he could now provide freshly killed meat for his customers.
It was to be expected that his new shop would include a meat room built with charcoal between the walls to keep the meat cool, but with the convenience of his Elizabeth Street yard, he could quite profitably slaughter only every two or three days. At the end of the first day any unsold meat would be rolled in dry salt and drained. But there was no real problem with waste meat turning black or becoming fly-blown. European housewives were accustomed to ‘‘hung’’ meat which they trimmed if necessary, washing it with wine or vinegar before cooking.
Patrick Mayne also established himself as a man to be counted on when the town rallied for a cause. His name appears on a wide variety of lists. Together with those who bought land in the North Quay area in 1853, he petitioned the Government Resident, Captain Wickham, for the rough tracks called George and William Streets to be made passable for horses and carriages. The following year he added his name to the petition for a bridge to link North Quay with South Brisbane. When Queen Street rallied behind the ‘‘reverend republican’’, John Dunmore Lang, with a request that he represent the Stanley Borough in the Legislative Council of New South Wales, Patrick’s name was published on the supporters’ list. With Tom Petrie, Hobbs the surgeon and twenty-two other leading townsfolk, he petitioned the Governor General to exercise clemency and remit the last year of the sentence of Patrick Irwin, a ticket-of-leave holder. (Their request was turned down.) His signature in those days was awkwardly formed, as though by a hand unused to writing. Occasionally he tried a flourish of loops and swirls but they show no fluidity, and a certain lack of penmanship.
In 1853, a second reward for the discovery of gold was offered, and Patrick’s increased contribution of £75 joined those of the eighty-five hopeful townsfolk who put up £2,825. These leading townsfolk rallied for a variety of reasons. On one occasion they raised over £500 as a reward for information about the malicious stabbing of a horse. In that horse-oriented society such a sum is an indication of just how necessary a good riding horse was, and how difficult to replace. Beyond the town boundary the lack of decent roads and the density of the scrub, with its rocky ridges and shallow rifts, could prevent a horse and cart or even a bullock and dray from travelling very far. Butchers needed to ride out to find straying stock; others rode to their new allotments; and—important to most of the entrepreneurs—a horse was vital for inspection of the uncleared outlying Crown land which the government intermittently released for sale. Even where there were discernible roads it was not uncommon, after rain, to find a lumpy bullock wagon bogged to its axles, barring the passage of all other wheeled vehicles. A sick or damaged horse could hobble a business man for a long time; this was why, to stop that sort of vindictiveness, John McCabe offered £100 reward for information. Almost every other trader, Mayne included, put up £5 each: in all, £513.11.0d. was offered. This was the equivalent of ten years’ wages for a labourer or butcher’s assistant. The reward was not claimed; the culprit was not caught.
From the beginning Patrick Mayne’s name is always well down on the variety of published lists, and throughout his life it continues that way. In a list of fifty or more names, his will be somewhere in the last half-dozen. These lists were rarely alphabetical; they clearly show a hierarchy of townsfolk. Always at the top are names such as Petrie, Cribb, Elphinstone, Raff, Markwell, Stephens and Eldridge. It begins to look as though Mayne is frequently among the last to be asked—or, alternatively, he does not offer, but has to be asked. The latter is unlikely. Reading his character from what is available, he actively sought a civic role and he also knew what was good for business. Most probably, as town scallywag who did not fit the others’ idea of respectability, he was one of the last called on and the last listed.
There are some lists on which his name does not appear. They usually involve donations which would provide little benefit to himself. In the Patriotic Fund list of 1855 for the war in the Crimea, the establishment and bourgeoisie names are there, led by pastoralist William Tooth, who gave £100. They also include, well down on the column, ‘‘Mr Chinaman Leon’’ and ‘‘a poor man’’ who each gave 2/6d. It is not surprising that Mayne is absent; in keeping with the political scene in Ireland, there is a conspicuous absence of Irish names. In the same year, a well-received fund to help the town shows an average donation of £3. Again, ‘‘a Chinaman’’ gave £3, but Patrick, clearly out of step with the other Queen Street traders, reluctantly gave £1.
One sad period in these years must have been the death of the baby Evelina Selina, who lived barely a year. Born in October 1853, she died, like so many of the colony’s infants, in the warm, fly-blown months and was buried in November 1854 in the new cemetery at Paddington. There is no indication whether the death of Evelina was a time of great grief, or whether it was stoically accepted in a colony where more than half the children failed to live beyond the age of five. Patrick’s energetic organisation of his growing empire left little time for his family. At the time of Evelina’s death, his brand-new acquisition of fifty-nine acres at Breakfast Creek urgently required fencing and stocking before the cattle belonging to his neighbour, Elphinstone, started grazing on his summer grass. There was no break in Patrick’s frenetic extension of his business or his activity in town affairs.
At those new, extensive cattleyards at Breakfast Creek, and his holding paddock in Elizabeth Street, he employed shepherds. There were up to two butchers in his shop and at home he hired a servant girl for Mary, who was soon pregnant again this time with William McIntosh whom she named after her father. Most certainly there would be someone to mind lively Rosanna and young Isaac. As well Patrick employed two fencers to split timber and fence the Breakfast Creek yards, then his land at Milton and elsewhere. He had a minimum of nine people on his payroll and continued to expand. His idea of work was not simply to extract every physical ounce of labour out of his men. He was efficient, and his orderly mind made him want to fix what he saw as intolerable government inefficiency. In September 1855 he called his own public meeting to discuss an amendment to the law relating to slaughtering of sheep and other animals within the colony of New South Wales. There is no record to say whether he attracted any supporters, or, if he did, the result of the meeting.
As more immigrants arrived, the pressure on rental housing became acute. It was another opportunity for gain for those with money. In 1855, when the usual town worthies called a meeting at the Exchange Rooms to re-establish a lapsed building society, Patrick offered himself as one of fifteen committee members. As usual, at the head of the list were the businessmen Buckley, Cribb, and Markwell; Mayne was number fifteen. They issued 151 shares of £50 each and were confident that by the next meeting they would reach their target of 200 shares.
Patrick Mayne’s energy must have been prodigious. He had confidence in his ability to organise and manage affairs and by the mid-1850s he was seeking involvement in almost every event in town. His ability was recognised by many others: he seems to have been accepted and actively involved in many financial and civic spheres of town life. Between his jousting in the court for his law infringements and his prosecution of others, his work at his yards and shop, his hides and tallow trade and his property investments, there were political and town business meetings to attend and petitions to sign. His civic involvement was vocal as well as physical: he was never one to remain mute in a gathering. The minutes of the early Council meetings reveal the scope of his advice and suggestions on town matters. He enjoyed vigorous debate, and at times his aggression makes him appear a thorn in the side of others present.
In August 1855 he was a signatory calling for John Richardson to come forward as a candidate to represent the Borough of Stanley in the by-election caused by the resignation of Henry Stuart Russell, MLA. Six months later, his name was listed with John Markwell, George Edmonstone, and Robert Cribb as members of a committee favourable towards the return of Henry Buckley for the County of Stanley. The following week he was appointed to a committee to promote the re-election of John Richardson. All these endeavours were successful.
Meanwhile, the idea of colonial separation was in the air. The people of Moreton Bay had many grievances against the Government so far away in Sydney. At all the political meetings the candidate enthused his audience when he spoke rousingly about Government neglect of basic needs such as a bridge to link north and south Brisbane, the untrafficable roads and the abysmal lack of a decent water supply. By the New Year of 1856, the people had reached a ceiling of frustration. The enthusiastic and vocal Mayne was at the lively separation meeting on 23 January 1856, but his signature on the petition tail-ends that of thirty-two of the town’s leading citizens.
Neither his public nor his business life were ever dull routine. Even bonded employees put their heads up now and again and caused him trouble. The system of bonded employees was well established and generally worked well for both parties. It had secured Patrick his passage to Australia and a chance to establish himself. But sometimes the system failed. He had bad luck with several Germans. One of them, Jacob Schelling, died in mysterious circumstances. After Patrick’s death in 1865, this tragedy was one of several apocryphal stories that was to haunt his children.
Schelling was a herdsman at Mayne’s bullock paddock, next to George Parsons’ farm at Milton. For almost two years Schelling’s accommodation had consisted of a large box about 150 yards from the waterhole in the paddock, which was some six feet deep. It was part of the watershed that fed Western Creek. The waterhole was his laundry tub, his bath, his water supply—and his death bed. He was a melancholy man who suffered fits of depression, a good target for a bully. It does not take much imagination to accept that on his pitiable days Schelling would have been a source of irritation to Patrick, provoking intimidation and constant harassment from his belligerent employer. Appearing to be frank and open, Mayne told the inquest into Schelling’s death that his employee was ‘‘terrified of him’’. Ten months earlier, an attempt by Schelling to hang himself from a tree had been aborted when the neighbouring farmer, George Parsons cut him down. On that occasion Mayne had remonstrated with his employee, giving him a tongue-lashing. Such castigation would have done nothing to ease Schelling’s suicidal depression. He was clearly a nuisance to Mayne, but still under bond. Two weeks before his death, when Mayne was killing a bullock (and quite likely accompanying it with a verbal attack on Schelling), the terrified man had begged his boss not to hang him. On 9 February 1858, one of Mayne’s labourers was sent on an errand to the German but could only find his shoes by the waterhole. He hurried back to Queen Street, where Mayne suggested that Schelling had drowned himself. The two then returned to Milton, and with George Parsons’ aid Schelling’s fully-clothed body was dragged from the waterhole, and with it a spare pair of trousers. Patrick suggested he may have been washing them.
At the inquest next day, Dr Barton gave evidence that the body did not present the appearance of death by drowning. There was more rigidity of the limbs than he would have expected, and the forearms were flexed on the arms. There was an unusual congestion about the face, with a good deal of frothy blood about the mouth and eyes, as well as dark marks on his posterior. Since Schelling had a brother of unsound mind in the Brisbane Hospital and there was no evidence to show how he had died, the case was closed without further investigation.
Perhaps the need to manhandle Jacob Schelling’s body from that watery grave triggered disturbing thoughts in the dark recesses of Patrick’s mind. The inquest over, he walked up to the solicitors Little and Rawlings to make his will. He was thirty-three, wealthy, with a young wife and three very bright and lively children. His will provided a very generous £100 each to the brother and three sisters he had farewelled in Ireland, and demonstrated his enduring care for his wife, Mary. She was to inherit £300 a year in half-yearly instalments, and if she remarried she would still receive £100 a year, which in those days, would have provided adequately for her needs. He gave total power to the executors and trustees of his estate. They were the influential merchant and entrepreneur, George Raff, and Patrick’s cousin, Joseph Darragh, whom he had sponsored in 1850, and trained and employed in his butcher shop.
Darragh’s wife Eliza had spent those years as Mary’s servant. Like Patrick, Joseph Darragh had been a farmhand at Cookstown, but after three years’ training with Patrick, he opened his own butchery at Kangaroo Point and was soon on the road to wealth. He was a singularly cruel and uncaring man. After twenty-three years of ill-treating his wife, the mother of his eleven children, he violently threw her into the street and began to cohabit with a young local girl, Mary Merritt. Although he owned property valued at £20,000 he abandoned Eliza with no means of support.
In 1858 Patrick could not have foreseen the final outcome of the Darragh marriage, but as both Joseph and Eliza had worked and lived on his premises, he must have known something of his cousin’s constant ill-treatment of her. Women at that time were frequently held in contempt; knowing Patrick’s own explosive temper and penchant for cruelty, one can only speculate about how he treated his own wife and children.
Raff and Darragh were appointed guardians of both the person and the inheritances of Patrick’s children—his boys until they turned twenty-one, his daughters during their ‘‘minority and discoverture’’. This clause, which embraced spinsters, divorced wives or adult widows, was common where large fortunes were concerned; it is particularly interesting in the light of Patrick’s death-bed confession, and the directive that none of his children was to marry.
Whatever Patrick’s role in Schelling’s death or any disturbing thoughts he may have had after it, they were quickly put behind him as his business activities claimed his time and continued to fill his coffers. Rents came in from two hotels, the Sawyers Arms and the Lord Raglan, from shops, houses, and farmland, and from the auctioneer R. Davidson, who hired his stockyard in Elizabeth Street for periodic stock auctions.
For Patrick Mayne, the zest in life came from being on the scene, in the thick of things. A number of the more affluent colonists had built substantial English-style stone, brick or timber houses set in small farms or large gardens; it was not the beauty of nature that gave him joy but action, talk and money-making. At no time did he try to change his home from the hemmed-in Queen Street shop site to one of the less central but more fashionable town boundary areas. In fact, in 1858 he advertised for rent a cottage in four acres of good garden adjoining the town boundary and the Brisbane River. It was one of an unknown number of properties he bought and sold in those years. In the same advertisement he sought a tenant for a dwelling in Edward Street.
That year Mary had been pregnant since April. Cooler, dust-free river air away from the stinking open drains and privies of the town buildings would have been more comfortable for her during the sweltering summer before their daughter, Mary Emelia, was born on the last day of December, 1858. Another pleasant area would have been the site of ‘‘Dara’’, which Patrick snapped up a few months later. It had a most desirable location but the simple house, with its mud walls did not seem to Patrick to match his affluence and self-esteem. When the Church subsequently bought ‘‘Dara’’, the parishioners were no more enamoured of it as a desirable home than Patrick. They considered it too crude a building for their Archbishop. In 1890, with Dunne as Archbishop, they raised £8,000 to build an elegant, three-storied Italianate mansion, the second ‘‘Dara’’. Unfortunately, this architectural gem was not to remain a part of Brisbane’s colonial heritage. A later Archbishop, James Duhig, blew it up to make way for the foundations of his special project, the never-to-be-built Holy Name Cathedral. For decades the site was a sleazy haunt for the homeless. Now, as Centenary Place, it is an up-market area of high-use home units. Of this fillip to town trade Patrick would have heartily approved.
1859 was a landmark year for the northern portion of the mother colony of New South Wales. It was an even more lively and satisfying year for politically ambitious colonials in the area. The separation movements, initially led by the squatters and taken up by J.D. Lang, a member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, eventually succeeded with the hesitant Colonial Office in London. On 10 December 1859 the Colony of Queensland, with almost 30,000 inhabitants, was established. Patrick Mayne had added his name to lists at separation meetings, but of more immediate importance to him was the agitation for Brisbane to be incorporated as a municipality.
For nine years, ever since he had become Brisbane’s new butcher at the age of twenty-five, and made his presence felt, he had been increasingly active in civic matters. He was now thirty-four, still belligerent, still handsome, and wealthy and successful. By remaining at the heart of things in Queen Street he knew everyone and they knew him. His large presence and colourful lifestyle made him ever-popular with the socially cohesive Irish community and he was known in the town as a man who worked for town improvement. If Brisbane was to become a municipality, he wanted to bring his vitality to a role on the council.
Patrick shared this political interest with George Raff, ten years older, a highly respected and a socially prominent merchant who planned to stand for the first Queensland Parliament. Other than wealth, business, and a desire to work the levers of power, the two men appeared to have very little in common. However, the fact that Mayne made Raff an executor of his will and was associated with him in a few business ventures suggests that for some time he had seen the older man as a mentor whose standing in the community enhanced his own. At this time there was clearly a political alignment between the two. Raff counted on Mayne and his Irish following for political support, and on his cooperative financial support for politically important causes such as the National School Fund.
In June 1859, a fund was opened to subsidise the under-funded secular Brisbane National School, and Patrick, along with many others, donated £2. W.A. Duncan, the Customs Officer, who represented the Catholic interest as a patron of the school, was leaving and another Catholic was needed as his replacement. George Raff, already a patron, and astutely aware of the uneducated Mayne’s political aspirations, was probably instrumental in ensuring a second donation, this time of £100 from Patrick. Mayne was publicly hailed as a generous donor, made one of the patrons, and, as such, was invited to replace the Catholic Duncan on the temporary Board of Education. He then took practical action to demonstrate his belief in the school. Nine-year-old Rosanna remained with her teacher, but his first-born son, Isaac, aged seven, was enrolled at the Government’s Normal School, a forerunner to that near Adelaide and Edward Streets. In that act Patrick was now seen as a supporter of the needs of all the town’s children, not just those of the Irish Catholic immigrants.
Perhaps it was on Raff’s advice that he curbed his larrikinism and avoided trouble with the law. From June 1858 until August 1860, well after both local and Queensland Government elections had been finalised, he managed to stay out of court. But the brutish characteristics in his nature were always there; he could not suddenly become docile. The press record suggests that he still threatened people with his whip, but for that period, he apparently did not use it.
By the time the heated debates on incorporation had resolved themselves and the municipality of Brisbane was proclaimed (7 August 1859), thirty-seven candidates were ready to contest the nine aldermanic seats. Five weeks later the town’s businessmen were runaway winners: John Petrie (builder and contractor), Patrick Mayne (butcher), T.B. Stephens (tanner and fellmonger), Joshua Jeays (architect and builder), A.J. Hockings (seedsman), George Edmonstone (butcher), Robert Cribb (baker and land agent), and two innkeepers, George Warren and William Sutton. Of the 1,519 votes cast, John Petrie, educated, able, and possibly the most respected man in the settlement, topped the poll with 325 votes. Patrick Mayne, with little respect for the law, but a wealthy patron of the school with a glib Irish tongue and boundless enthusiasm and energy, achieved 274. At last his name was high on a public list, proudly second instead of being at the tag-end, and ahead of the educated, socially accepted and wealthy T.B. Stephens, who had become part-proprietor of the Moreton Bay Courier.
It had not been easy to find nine good men who wanted this unpaid responsibility. On election, Petrie contented himself with promising to discharge his duties faithfully. Mayne declared that he would concentrate on work rather than talk, and was sure that his election reflected the appreciation of the community for the work he had already done. Stephens implied that he had not solicited election, but would accept office as a matter of duty. ‘‘Honest Bob’’, Robert Cribb, known for his simple tastes, austere habits and personal kindness, was further down the poll. Petrie and Cribb were men for whom Patrick and the townsfolk had great respect. Petrie appears to have kept a business length away from Mayne, but Cribb, more charitable towards his fellow men, offered the Maynes neighbourly concern at several times of need.
All nine aldermen were practical men. Most had some formal education, a few had almost none, but they had all made their own successful way in a rough, uncaring colony. Seven of them were bearded and soberly dressed and looked the epitome of city fathers; the clean-shaven, nattily dressed Sutton and Mayne both had police records. Sutton’s was related to being drunk in charge of his hotel. One wonders what dark and fearsome thoughts whispered in Mayne’s mind at meeting after meeting as he sat opposite William Sutton in Council. In 1848, those two men, with Lynch and Platt, had been post-midnight drinking companions at Sutton’s Bush Inn a short while before Patrick Mayne murdered Robert Cox, and Sutton had been arrested as a suspect.
Patrick’s role as school patron had been worn with great success during the municipal elections. In the Council’s first meetings he showed himself to be a practical, cooperative alderman. It says something for George Raff’s political power in the community that in February the following year, the Queensland Government Gazette listed Patrick Mayne as one of the Governor’s nine appointees to the first Board of National Education in Queensland, serving under the presidency of Sir Charles Nicholson. For the ambitious Mayne this was a real distinction in the community. He was not only sitting as an equal at the same table as educated members of the establishment, but helping to make decisions for the education of their children. He could be excused for thinking his social alienation was over: around the table were the highly respected Hon. Robert Ramsay Mackenzie, Daniel Rountree Somerset, George Raff, William Thornton, Charles Tiffin, Henry Jordan and Henry Day.
Patrick’s success as an alderman, and now his pride in what he saw as an exalted role, became too visible and too audible. Some townsfolk were not willing to accept an upstart, almost illiterate butcher on their Board of Education. They had no difficulty in accepting a successful butcher as an alderman, but this appointment was an affront. Shock and anger turned to ridicule of the man. Rumours spread like a bushfire and the blaze was quickly out of control. It was said that ‘‘Patrick Mayne was too big for his boots; now he planned to stand for Parliament.’’ There was no objection to other aldermen who later successfully stood for the State legislature, but Mayne they did not want. The rumours grew. The smirks and derision were undisguised. Patrick was disparaged from all sides. The effect on a man of his explosive temperament must have been devastating. In three weeks the ‘‘hate’’ campaign against him reached a point where the Executive Council had to step in to protect its decision, publishing a rebuttal of the scuttlebutt in the Moreton Bay Courier of 8 March 1860. It read:
Harassment of Mayne did not vanish overnight. Open season on him lingered for several weeks but, after the Executive Council statement he immediately took his own action to regain some lost prestige. In the Moreton Bay Courier of 20 March he called for public tenders for the erection of a stable and coach-house. The shortage of trafficable roads made the acquisition of a coach something of a trumpet flourish, but he, Mary, and the children would ride in as much style as any educated town doctor or high government official. Two weeks later he called tenders for the erection of two more imposing brick shops in Queen Street.
The parliamentary election campaign was gearing up. Mayne’s close political association with George Raff had fuelled the false rumours that he, like Raff, would stand for parliament. He made an obvious show of being out and about and involved at all the rallies. He proposed the shipping agent, Henry Buckley, to represent East Moreton, seconded John Petrie’s nomination of Raff, and constantly and loudly down-cried D.F. Roberts, a solicitor and member of the Queensland Club, who aspired to represent Fortitude Valley. In retaliation, Roberts, who called himself ‘‘the Poor Man’s Friend’’, refuelled the anti-Mayne campaign with an advertisement in the Moreton Bay Courier of 1 May 1860:
From this it is clear that Mayne had faced down some of the early ridicule in his customary manner, confronting his detractors in his rage and bitterness with the threat of his stockwhip. He also continued to display the power of his wealth by spending another £100 on two town lots at Lytton and eighteen acres of prime land at Enoggera.
Then, abruptly, he went to Sydney. He left behind a newly pregnant Mary—she was carrying their last child, James O’Neil—and was absent from the new Council for the next five consecutive meetings, but there is no explanation of his absence. Had he been on Council business the minutes would have recorded it. In Moreton Bay this was a time of business optimism. Land prices were high and he was rich in land. He had sensibly slowed his buying during this last twelve months of a seller’s market. He was a player in the building boom and his two latest modern shops were well on the road to completion.
One might question why a man so actively interested in politics should choose to be away at a time of great celebration to culminate their political efforts—the opening of the first Queensland Parliament on 29 May. It was also quite out of character for him to leave town when his political opponents were biting at his heels, and not to oversee the construction of his expensive buildings. Two things could have taken him on that uncomfortable lengthy trip to Sydney. A need to seek private medical attention during the anti-Mayne period of mental stress; or the need to raise a large loan from a Sydney bank for further business expansion. No other immediate business expansion took place, but by September 1860 he had accumulated a sizeable debt with the Bank of New South Wales.
Soon after his return, his Queen Street shops were opened (July), to be hailed in the Moreton Bay Courier as an imposing feature of Queen Street’s architecture. One shop was let to Mr Kosvitz, a jeweller and watchmaker, and Mayne was congratulated on the plate-glass windows and brilliant gas lighting which enhanced the display of wares. His use of acetylene lamps, the first in Brisbane shops, was an innovation exciting to a populace accustomed to the limited illumination of oil lamps. It predated the general use of gas lighting by several years. But this show of wealth, business acumen and self-confidence was not enough. Public ridicule of him had reflected on the Executive Council. Six months after the announcement of his nomination to the temporary Board of Education, the Government Gazette published a new list: the name of Patrick Mayne was missing.