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 death-bed 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 size 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.
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:
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.