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Authors: Rosamond Siemon

Tags: #True Crime/Murder General

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It is typical of the times that although Fr Dunne's letter was addressed to Mrs Mayne, it is everywhere accepted and written that ‘‘Rosie was transferred at the request of her father who was one of the most influential Catholic business men in Brisbane''. He had been dead for nine years.

During this period of her eldest daughter's difficulty, Mary had sold the butchery, but the family remained in their Queen Street home adjoining the shop. It was large, brick, comfortable and central. Like Patrick, Mary had preferred to work from the hub of things. Now she had more time for her children, but during those earlier, more difficult years, the eldest three had been busy building their own lives. Isaac, twenty-two and man of the house, had high hopes of getting approval for registration as a solicitor, Rosanna was soon to be professed as a nun with the Sisters of Mercy, William, with good scholastic results, had plans to further his education at the University of Sydney. The household had shrunk to Mary, her sister-in-law Ann Mayne and her three sons. Only young James still needed her supervision. Patrick's estate was not yet finalised. The rents, property maintenance and the debt repayment were time-consuming, but without the shop, the load was a great deal lighter. It was time for a change.
Queen Street was no longer suitable for Mary or the children's future.

There were several rented houses in Patrick's estate, and in 1874 Mary decided to move the family to one of them at Milton, where the estate held quite a lot of land. None of it had a river frontage, but with the rapid expansion of Brisbane, Milton was a coming suburb. Several very substantial homes were being erected in the area. Some of the Mayne land had been intersected by resumptions for the new Brisbane to Ipswich railway line. It is possible they moved to the hill behind their river-fronted neighbours, John Markwell and the Kents, who rented grazier J.F. McDougall's two-storied ‘‘Milton House''. McDougall's land stretched almost from Cribb Street, Milton, to what is now Chasely Street, Auchenflower. Markwell, a Queen Street ironmonger, owned a charming low-set bungalow with wide shady verandas around which spread a wilderness of shrubs and flowers. It was called ‘‘Moorlands Villa'', and his land stretched upstream from Chasely Street to the shallow Langsville Creek, which meandered by what is now Patrick Lane, Toowong.

The move to Milton was probably about mid-year, for, at the beginning of the third term, Mary's youngest child, the quiet, introspective twelve-year-old James, finished at St Stephen's primary school and joined his brother at Brisbane Grammar. Unlike William, James did not excel at sport. He quietly got on with his studies and left no mark of his passing.

Life settled into some sort of normalcy at Milton and
by late 1877 the end of all their financial problems was in sight. There was, however, no end to their other problem. Although Patrick's death was well behind them, the public memory of his life still imposed an undeclared persecution. With the building of the new St Stephen's Cathedral in 1875, Mary had offered reparation for her husband's sins by donating one of the beautiful stained-glass windows on the side wall. A memorial to Patrick, it portrays a fallen soldier at the feet of a merciful Christ. But that gift made no difference to people's attitude. The innocent members of the family continued to pay a price. Whispered stories were kept alive and the family drew in on itself. To this day, the aging offspring of old-timers still say: ‘‘Oh yes, I remember that family. We knew they were there, but we wouldn't have taken tea with them.'' Some even point out that it was not for reasons of class; among those they called on was a successful family of O'Sheas whose pioneering mother was a washerwoman.

The Maynes had a justifiable pride in achievement, and out of that grew a quiet dignity, a tangible barrier with a soft gentleness which has been a remembered quality in the three youngest. It hid a lot of unhappiness, but was so well disciplined that it remained intact through all the horror that was to come. There was little hint of this in 1877. Rosanna was professed as a nun at All Hallows', taking the name of Sister Mary Mel. Isaac had been registered as a solicitor the year before and remained with his employer, Thomas Bunton, in Queen Street. William was in his second year of an Arts course at the University of
Sydney, and at nineteen, Mary Emelia had absorbed as much education as she found interesting and was allowed to leave school. She was tall, with a lively, wide-eyed, open face, full of life and restless. Their mother, with more time on her hands than she had ever had before, was bored with suburbia. The isolation and discrimination had barely impinged on her busy life as a butcher; now it became obvious. She was fifty-seven, independent and hard-working; like Patrick, she did not take kindly to being slighted. Thanks to the way she had kept the business going, since 1868, they had each drawn a living allowance. Those who could get away would now travel to Europe. They were Mary, Patrick's sister Ann Mayne, young Mary Emelia, and Isaac, who was quite happy to take leave and escort them. James was at a crucial stage of his secondary education, so at the beginning of 1878 he was transferred from Brisbane Grammar School to board at the Catholic St Killian's College at South Brisbane. It was regarded as the right school for boys who were likely prospects for the priesthood, and to that end he studied history, geography, French and Latin. The arrangement was also convenient for his Catholic guardian, Joseph Darragh of Kangaroo Point, whose eldest son joined the holiday-makers as a companion for Isaac.

On 28 March 1878, they sailed for Marseilles on the R.M.S.
Bowen.
It was not a very large ship (884 tons) and had only three other European passengers. It was, however, crammed with a large number of Chinese returning to Singapore and Hong Kong via four northern
Queensland ports and Thursday Island. Their exodus was due, no doubt, to the new Chinese Immigration Act and the Gold Fields Amendment Act, brought in when it was realised that on the Palmer goldfields in North Queensland there were 17,000 Chinese, outnumbering Europeans by twelve to one. For the Maynes it was a sensible choice of ship. It gave them an opportunity to experience something of the Orient, and avoided the popular ships which took the southern route to England and were patronised by those whose gossip could have dampened the family's pleasure.

Those few months before they sailed were the last time the entire family was to have much time together. In 1879, once the debt was cleared and the estate could be finalised, the young adult Maynes began receiving their inheritance of property. Good regular rents allowed the boys to step out into the world. William lived comfortably in Sydney, later to be joined by James. After gaining his Bachelor of Arts degree, William remained in Sydney to study for a Master's degree. He was still there when James arrived in 1880. Both graduated in 1884, at which time James left for postgraduate study at University College Hospital in London. At home, Isaac assumed nominal headship of the family, but it was a home dominated by two women, his mother, and Aunt Ann, and disturbed by the frustrated wilfulness of Mary Emelia. Nevertheless, it was to Isaac that Fr Dunne wrote when next he tried to help Rosanna.

Dunne's troubles with Bishop Quinn came to a head in 1880, when the Bishop chose to interpret an application for holiday leave as a resignation. Protests failed, so on 11 March 1881 Dunne sailed for London. Although he had worked in Toowoomba for more than twelve years, he had not forgotten his pastoral care of several of his earlier charges, including the Maynes. He still corresponded with them. Rosanna's state of mental health in 1881 is not known, but Dunne and her family were well aware of its continued fragility. While in Sydney, on board ship, and in Ireland, he kept in contact with her, bolstering her spirit and suggesting ways of living a calm life. In some half-dozen letters to her he wrote of the contemplative life of nineteenth-century monks and their detachment from material things. He noted a similar detachment in good missionaries, and from Dublin he described how he found the genuine joy of monastic solitude at Mt Melleray Abbey.

During his travels he was never far from news of Queensland. He was saddened by Bishop Quinn's illness and death in August, and disturbed by news that some Brisbane Sisters of Mercy might be sent hundreds of miles north to the fledgling see of Rockhampton. On 8 September he wrote two letters, one to Rosanna explaining some difficulties in the secular life in Brisbane, and a second to her brother, Isaac, warning him that if young Brisbane Sisters of Mercy were sent to Rockhampton and the
Queensland diocese was subsequently divided, they would be lost to Brisbane forever. Isaac acted on the warning. Rosanna (Sister Mary Mel) was not in the contingent that went to Rockhampton.

Robert Dunne's subsequent return to Queensland in March 1882 to become the new Bishop of Brisbane was a source of satisfaction to Mary. The now financially and intellectually independent Maynes no longer needed him, but the valuable friendship remained. Despite the fact that her children were staunch, church-going Catholics, Protestant Mary never converted to their faith. That was no reflection on her high regard for Bishop Dunne. She admired him and respected his wise and comforting advice. At All Hallows', Rosanna's mental health began a sharp decline, with an intermittent need to control her in a strait-jacket. At such times, Dunne's compassion must have gone a long way to easing Mary's mind about her daughter's welfare. In the light of Patrick's psychopathic behaviour, Rosanna's future was cause for considerable anxiety. No longer able to teach, she was relieved of that work; on her good days she was allowed to act as secretary to Mother Vincent. Those good days were to become fewer and farther apart.

In October 1881, their fifty-eight year old neighbour, John Markwell, had died and when his widow Harriet put the river-fronted ‘‘Moorlands Villa'' up for sale, the Maynes purchased it. The house had a sad history. Markwell married three times. The house was a wedding gift to him and his second wife Georgina. She and three of her
children died early. Two children died at ten months, one at fifteen months, a seven-year-old was drowned, and one daughter did not survive her twelfth year. The sixth, his eldest son, Henry John Markwell, managed to reach twenty-three before he was fatally thrown from his galloping horse. The coming of the Maynes to River Road did not end the tragedy attached to that apparently charming garden of Eden. Instead, the name Markwell eventually became intricately entangled in the complex Mayne family myth.

After the move, Mary dropped from recorded view. Owning no property in her own right, she features only once in a Post Office directory. Isaac's name now appears with the address River Road, Toowong. It would be imagining the inconsistent to expect that a woman of Mary's strength and temperament spent all her time quietly but happily, in her pleasant garden with the company of her sister-in-law and some of her children. Having exercised command in her world for eighteen years, she was unlikely now to take a back seat. There is more reason to believe that her authority was never surrendered to any of her sons. It was a women's household in which Isaac lived and to which William returned, aged twenty-eight. In 1884 he came home from Sydney University with a Master of Arts degree, a gentleman's style, a taste for good jewellery, and no apparent inclination to do other than live on the money he had inherited. He allowed himself to become a Commissioner of the Peace, which no doubt was useful in witnessing signatures in the various family property deals.
The outgoing young sportsman of Grammar School days had drained his small cup of social freedom. Coming home, he faced social stigma because of his father's crime. The gentleman's clubs which might have rounded out the style of life he desired were not open to him. He, too, withdrew and became locked into a very private life. Local folklore agrees that he was an excellent horseman, a skill he had learned from Patrick in the 1860s. Until old age he rode regularly in solitude in the western suburbs. He still kept a horse at ‘‘Moorlands'' at the time of his death.

Despite the Maynes' low profile, the family shame was never allowed to be buried by the passage of time. In 1888, Henry Stuart Russell's book
The Genesis of Queensland
retold the gruesome story of the Cox murder. No doubt the fact that Isaac Mayne was a solicitor stayed the author's pen from actually naming Patrick as the murderer, but he ended the chapter by writing:

the cook was charged with the crime, tried, convicted and hung, in spite of loud protestations of innocence. Some years afterwards another, in the horror of a deathbed upbraiding, confessed that he had been the guilty one, and had looked on at the execution of his innocent
locum tenens!
Let his name perish!

Brisbane people avidly read this popular history of their State. The reborn tragedy ensured that the family had little peace. Its effect on them, particularly on the ageing Mary, was incalculable. On 3 September 1889 she suffered a heart attack and died. If her immigration papers are
correct, she was sixty-eight, not sixty-three as stated on her death certificate. Although she remained a Protestant, she was buried high on a hill in the Irish Catholic section of the Toowong cemetery by her long-time friend, the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Robert Dunne.

BOOK: The Mayne Inheritance
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