5

In and Out of Council

The municipality of Brisbane under the first Council’s charge consisted of several settlements. North Brisbane was centred on Queen Street, which, with its houses, shops, and banana plantation, was a convenient thoroughfare to the eastern settlements of Fortitude Valley, Nundah and Sandgate. The area of North Brisbane also included Adelaide, George, and Elizabeth Streets and adjoining areas with residences dotted here and there. A ferry ride across the river were North Brisbane’s two rivals, South Brisbane and Kangaroo Point; but the Point, with eighty or ninety houses and some industry, was no longer a real threat to Queen Street. That hope had been picked up by Fortitude Valley, which was strengthened by J.D. Lang’s migrant scheme, and saw itself making a strong challenge.

The mainstream religions had claimed their hallowed patches a stone’s throw from some of the central hotels and a brewery. Four banks eased the earlier difficulty of circulating cash for trading, and the new hospital in George Street and the new gaol on Petrie Terrace catered to the needs of the area’s 5,000 people. Thanks to astute and civic-minded men such as Cribb and Mayne, a few substantial business premises stood out, but for the most part the public buildings were mean and unimpressive. Everything was deplorably neglected. Sanitation conditions were primitive; there were open sewers, and their effluent, dumped near houses on the river bank, was a menace to health. Depending on the weather, the rough streets could be dusty and rutted or else deep bogs interspersed with uncrossable muddy pools. In the rainy season, adroit shopkeepers were known to keep trade coming their way by spanning a street pool with a plank. It was not uncommon to hear cries for help from a pedestrian bogged in the mud. In Adelaide, Elizabeth, and Charlotte Streets, in reality only rough passages between allotments, whole areas could be isolated by deep, unbridged water-filled culverts. The so-called ‘‘reservoir’’ was an unfenced, dammed-up waterhole lying between George and Roma Streets. In drought it dried up and water had to be carted from Breakfast Creek. People bathed and swam in it and washed their clothes there and dogs and cattle drank from it. Its creek, often a chain of waterholes, meandered across the site of the present City Hall and the intersection of Adelaide and Albert Streets, then swept in a wide curve through what are now the two Queen Street blocks separated by Edward Street. It turned north to cross Creek Street at its corner with Adelaide Street, then made a wide down-curve through the next block, crossing what is now Eagle Lane, returning in a series of loops to Creek Street at its junction with Elizabeth Street. After a large, boggy circular loop at the rear of the site of St Stephen’s Cathedral, it entered the Brisbane River near the junction of Mary, Creek, and Charlotte Streets. For some it was still known as Wheat Creek and much of the surrounding area continued to be used for agriculture.

The task ahead of the first councillors was enormous. Lacking a Council building, their first meeting was held in the Queen Street police barracks, with the Police Magistrate supplying their furniture, before they were given a temporary office at the Court House. Their first year’s budget was expected to be £1,000—that alone was needed for the reservoir and drainage. The municipality was in urgent need of the energy and practical commonsense of its nine aldermen.

In politics, as in life generally, Mayne was always determined to have his say on everything. He was quick to nominate people and projects, and to second other people’s ideas. He immediately and successfully nominated John Petrie as Mayor. When he moved that a committee be appointed, he always named himself and those other aldermen he thought should work with him. These suggestions were neither wild nor Machiavellian. They reflected his enthusiasm and practical approach. All the aldermen were men of property. In nominating a committee to revalue the assessable property in the municipality, his sensible suggestion was of men of the most experience: Petrie the builder and contractor, Jeays the architect and builder, and Cribb and himself, whose extensive and successful land purchases showed they had a businesslike understanding of the varying value of allotments. Patrick was a man who got things done, and he embraced civic problems with a wrestler’s grip. Bullying tactics and cunning were intricately woven with his shrewd business sense. Business ethics played little part in his life. He argued that instead of sending out rate notices, a list of names and rate assessments should be published in the newspaper. For those who failed to pay by the due date, his solution was to publish their names in the social pages. He thought that disrespectful letters should be returned to the sender, and when a Mr Porter lodged a complaint about a surveying matter followed by a notice of action, Patrick moved that they put it into the wastepaper basket. The over-worked Town Clerk fared no better. In 1861, he requested a rise from £200 to £250 a year; Mayne abruptly moved that if the Clerk was dissatisfied, the Council should put the job out to tender.

He had trouble differentiating between what could be expected of aldermen and paid Council employees. The aldermen, unpaid, spent hours away from their own business affairs as they inspected and discussed the young town’s enormous problems. It had not been easy to find suitable townsfolk who thought the personal cost worthwhile, but for the young, energetic and wealthy Mayne the opportunity to administer the affairs of the town and the status it gave him more than offset the responsibility and the sacrifice in time and finance. As a butcher he could recoup nothing, but some of the other aldermen were in a more fortunate position as contractors or suppliers of stone, timber, or imported items for the roadworks and buildings. While he never failed to grasp an opportunity to make more and more money for himself, he was not too keen on council contractors making much profit. He kept a practical, businesslike eye on Council finances, especially tendering, always looking out for signs of jobbery. He always called for the lowest tender to be accepted and closely watched the job to ensure it was well done and on time. This did not endear him to those aldermen who secured Council contracts.

There is no doubt that in his first term, Mayne, at thirty-six, the youngest alderman, was an authoritarian but very useful and energetic member. He worked hard on several committees to improve the town environment. He was a tidy man, neatly dressed; he liked a good appearance in everything. The buildings he had put up enhanced the townscape. His bête noire was vandalism which defaced and damaged town buildings. He clearly could not catch the culprits—otherwise he would have personally whipped them off the street. Instead, he urged the Council to post a £5 reward for their apprehension. Although he was one of the wealthiest men in town, his lack of social acceptance by the bourgeoisie kept him a man for the workers. Much of his contribution at that time reflects that. He succeeded in moving that ‘‘all children, not just those at denominational schools, travel free on the ferries’’, but he had less success in trying to gain the same concession for cross-river church-goers.

Understandably the pressure of their own business caused most aldermen occasionally to miss meetings. In the Council’s first term Patrick had been away from mid-May to late June; eighteen months later, he was again absent from mid-December 1861 to mid-January 1862, another five weeks. Alderman Cribb reported to the Council that he was away on urgent private affairs. This was immediately followed by the necessity of his standing down as one of three annual retirees, and a subsequent lacklustre performance in the February 1862 municipal election, when he failed to re-take his former seat. Alderman R.S. Warry replaced him. The title of alderman had given him a status that made up for lack of social acceptance. The role of alderman gave him the power he wanted to organise and run things and argue how he thought they should be done. In view of his desire and need for this role, his long absence just prior to an election is surprising. His lacklustre performance may have been due to the fact that serious illness was beginning to manifest itself, or that some lingering aspects of the anti-Mayne campaign of ridicule still worked against him. In a burst of political energy he registered his family as parishioners at the little Catholic church in Duncan Street, Fortitude Valley. It was from here he hoped to gain more votes at the next election.

From 1863, when he again stood for Council, this time successfully as representative for Fortitude Valley, his irrational comments and behaviour gradually became more obvious. If he felt Council proceedings were becoming tedious, he would produce his ‘‘monocle’’, a leather ring the size of an eye-glass. According to John Cameron’s reminiscence, if an alderman deviated from the facts or exaggerated, Mayne, who was rough in manner, would deliberately and ostentatiously place the leather ring firmly at his eye and stare at the speaker in a comic manner, to disconcert him and cause general laughter from all the others. This glass-less leather ring had such an unnerving effect on some aldermen that on one occasion the question was asked as to whether it was not a breach of the law to use a leather ring in the form of an eye-glass.

In August 1863 Patrick began a four months’ agitation over the fire bell. With others he had approved its cost of £30, but when he found the installed bell had cost £50, he belligerently moved that it be dismantled and returned and a new one procured, not exceeding the sum voted.

Brisbane was no stranger to fire. There was no reticulated water supply, no fire brigade, and the clusters of combustible wooden buildings with their oil lamps, naked candles and wood stoves nightly housed far too many incautious inebriates. Their safety and survival could depend on the clanging of the fire bell for quick action to limit a fire’s spread by a bucket brigade and others with piles of soaking blankets. Mayne was well aware of the danger. Ever since he had built his brick home and shops, which were flanked by flimsy, combustible timber buildings, he had advocated an end to timber construction in the business area. Such vulnerability was devastatingly proved on 11 April 1864, when a large tract of Queen Street West was lost to the flames. One side of the block was almost annihilated when one hotel, fourteen shops, two houses and numerous offices were incinerated. Even the brick buildings were vulnerable because of their highly inflammable shingle roofs. There were no water carts, and all the private tanks in Queen, Albert, and Adelaide Streets were emptied to meet the demands of the fire, which was halted only when men of the Twelfth Regiment chopped down the North Brisbane Hotel and two shops to make a fire break. In the subsequent unprotected condition of the town, nineteen men and women were charged with stealing from the piles of salvaged goods which the frantic shopowners had stacked for safety in the street. The people had always known that they were impotent to save valuable buildings from fire; they lived with that constant dread and insecurity. Only a few days before that fire, a meeting of protesting townsfolk had called on both Government and Council to finance some means of fire protection for their homes and businesses. The Council factions, too busy struggling against each other, did nothing. With that common knowledge, Mayne’s months of intransigence over the fire bell was in contradiction to his call for fire control and new building regulations. His haggling over the cost of the fire bell strained the patience of other councillors.

He was becoming more argumentative than usual, and in division was almost always against the motion unless it was his. In Council, it sometimes seemed as though his motions were no longer the product of his practical mind but drawn from the grumbles of the groups of labourers with whom he drank after work. He certainly got a short shrift from the very hardworking business aldermen when he proposed that in the summer months Council labourers should be granted a three-hour midday siesta from 11.30a.m. to 2.30p.m.

Argument over the water supply rumbled on for years, but during the 1863–64 debates on water resources, parliamentarian George Raff’s manipulative influence on Mayne might be suspected. Intimating that he had privileged information, Mayne moved that the Government and not the Council was the proper party to be trusted with the supply of water to the town. At this time politics were being played fast and hard between the Council factions as well as between the Council and the Queensland Government. His rambling, accusatory attacks on fellow aldermen inflamed an already testy issue. He argued that the Council was not capable of carrying out the work properly, that the Government had no faith in the Corporation of Brisbane and planned to take over the work. He then attacked the civil hydraulic engineer, Mr Oldham, arguing that the Government could obtain the assistance of scientific men and would not employ men who had broken down in other parts of the world. Neither would the Government encourage worthless flunkies who were able to do nothing. Therefore he thought the waterworks should be entrusted to Government management. When he was accused of borrowing ideas, he pledged his word that his motion ‘‘came out of my own head which, though a big one, has plenty in it.’’ Obstinate to the end of the debate, he stood alone when the rest of the aldermen were determined to resist the Government.

He missed seven meetings during 1864 and the Council minutes suggest that his contribution to debate had little of the commonsense and vigour of his first term. In February 1865, when it was customary to elect the Mayor for the year, the factions within the Council began jockeying to have their man elected. The competition descended to squabbles; Mayne, determined to be heard, seemed to be in some state of confusion. He nominated John Petrie, then seconded the nomination favouring Alderman Pettigrew. The arguments ranged over two discordant meetings before Alderman Hockings was elected Mayor.

To some extent Patrick’s usual rough tongue and bellicose stance and the faction-ridden breakdown of reasonable debate must have masked his changing health and irrationality. He was again elected to the Finance Committee. This lasted just over two months before it became clear to everyone that he was a very ill man. Because of his continued absence, Alderman Graham officially replaced him on the committee. Towards the end of May, a nurse was engaged for him, but he struggled to his last Council meeting on 5 June 1865. From then on until his death on 17 August, he needed full-time nursing at his Queen Street home.