The Mayne Inheritance by Rosamond Siemon Page A

is more likely, in such an astute man who had watched others fail by overreaching themselves, that by 1864 he was losing the concentration and tight grip that had directed the accumulation of his wealth.
    The pre-dawn tragedy that had hit the business heart of Brisbane months earlier, when a large tract of Queen Street West was incinerated, had not involved loss or damage to any Mayne property. However, the cost had been enormous to town trade, insurance companies, and owners of other premises, some of which were not insured. To cap it all, the cracks in the economy were beginning to show. Prices rose and credit was tightened. Unable to afford to rebuild, some licked their wounds and quietly went bankrupt, leaving their creditors to go into deeper debt. Others patched and painted and began tradingagain. For a while the scope of the financial damage was not clearly realised.
    In October, Patrick’s and other councillors’ agitation to improve the appearance and fire safety of Brisbane was taken up by newspaper proprietor and alderman T.B. Stephens. Mayne seconded the successful motion that the upper part of the town between Ann, Alice and Saul Streets be proclaimed ‘‘first-class’’. All new town buildings were to have external walls of brick.
    Seven weeks later, on Thursday, 1 December 1864, Brisbane’s worst-ever fire began in Stewart and Hemmant’s corner drapery and blazed out of control uphill until it had consumed twenty-two business premises, the new Music Hall, and some forty houses in the block bounded by Queen, Albert, Elizabeth, and George Streets. Lost in the blaze were four drapery stores, three hotels, three restaurants, two banks, two butcher shops, two saddleries, and others supplying groceries, fruit, confectionery, oysters and jewellery, as well as the auctioneer’s mart. Most of the destroyed wooden houses had been crowded behind the Queen Street shops and occupied by the poor. The fire was only prevented from sweeping along George Street when a group detached from the hundreds of voluntary fire-fighters was able to demolish Mr Pillow’s humpy to make a fire-break. The Brisbane Courier reported that 6,000 people gathered to watch the great fire. This time looters were held at bay by redcoats from the Twelfth Regiment with fixed bayonets, parading in front of the smouldering ruins as the conflagration ate its way throughthe rest of the unprotected block. At its height the flames and sparks roared so high that for some time the survival of the opposite side of Queen Street was in doubt, even though the buildings had been smothered in wet blankets.
    Mayne was not among the butchers who were burnt out, but his new brick shops, praised for their brilliant gas lighting, were in ruins. His tenant, Kosvitz the jeweller, had time to save only some of his stock. The Mayne account entries for repairs to burnt premises reveal that the Cafe Nationale and at least two of his houses also suffered. The Brisbane Courier, which gave much space to naming the leading townsfolk who were especially prominent in their exertions to save property, listed all the usual hierarchy of names, all aldermen or town businessmen, but made no mention of Patrick Mayne.
    Was this because of the continued non-acceptance of this very wealthy alderman as a social equal to those other townsfolk? He was too large a man to remain unnoticed, too aggressive and authoritarian to have done nothing. His own properties were at hazard and it is inconceivable that he and his staff were not helping. The Brisbane Courier’ s constant overlooking of Mayne when he could have had positive publicity must raise the possibility that there may have been an undercurrent of dark and shadowy suspicion about his link with the long-ago Cox murder, or even that of the German herdsman, Jacob Schelling. There may also have been an element of this in the anti-Mayne publicity when he was nominated to the Education Boardin 1860.