The Mayne Inheritance by Rosamond Siemon

Author:Rosamond Siemon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime/Murder General
ISBN: 9780702255311
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

8

Out of the Ashes

It is fair to say that Patrick’s widow, Mary McIntosh Mayne, was the unsung hero of the family, the woman whose efforts the ultimate beneficiary, the University of Queensland, might recognise. She inherited no property; the only tangible remnant of her life is a neat, regular signature on her will and on the accounts rendered to the Court at the end of her long labour to save the estate. Not even a photograph of her exists. If James and Mary were any indication, her children were relatively handsome, but whether she is reflected in their strong faces and wide-set eyes, we cannot know.

Buoyed up with news of Patrick’s success in Australia, his sister Rosa, to whom he had left £100, decided to try her luck in Brisbane. In the early 1840s she had left County Tyrone for New York, married Joseph Mooney and borne several children. The family’s arrival in 1866 was probably at Mary’s suggestion; soon the Mooneys became licensees paying rent to the Mayne estate for the Royal Exchange Hotel at the corner of Albert and Elizabeth Streets. It is doubtful whether the two families could have maintained more than a kin relationship, for when Joseph died in 1871, Rosa continued to rent and run the hotel while raising their seven children. She would have had as little time for social life as the fully occupied Mary. What Rosa did display was the same strength and drive as that of her brother, Patrick. Both Patrick’s sisters, Ann and Rosa, were close enough to Mary to witness her signature on her will, but the young Mooneys’ lives took different paths from that of their wealthy and well-educated cousins. Aunt Ann Mayne, for whom Mary, and then her children, always assumed a responsibility, probably maintained the family contact. For forty-three years she lived as a helpful and welcome member in the Mayne household, but after her death the Mooneys do not appear to have been among the visitors to ‘‘Moorlands’’.

Four of Mary’s children, like their parents, were achievers. Rosanna at All Hallows’ was doing very well, particularly in music and French. In 1866 the only further education available for teenage boys came from one of about two dozen townsfolk with varying standards of education who advertised classes in their homes for a shilling a week. The Reverend B.G. Shaw’s Collegiate School, conducted in his home ‘‘Alexandra’’ on Wickham Terrace, was selected for Isaac; here he eventually passed an examination which led to employment as a clerk with Queen Street solicitor Thomas Bunton. Fr Dunne’s protective eye was never far away from the Mayne children, and his night school for boys no doubt also contributed to Isaac’s further education so that he was able to be articled to Bunton in 1871. The bright but younger William and James were yet to prove themselves.

A factor in the shaping of Rosanna’s life was the extension of the work of the Sisters of Mercy to the Darling Downs. The 1860s depression

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