The Mayne Inheritance Read Online Free Page A

apprehension pressed urgently, for waiting on the wharf below were groups of sun-browned men in down-drawn hats and oddly mixed clothes, some withhorses or drays, hungry for their new workforce. It was time for the emigrants to leave the shelter of their sea-bound home and be whisked away to a new, perhaps still hard, temporary bondage. Sydney in 1841 was bursting with opportunity for those who sought it, but the new arrivals, mostly contracted to work for two years, had to rein in their impatience.
    By 1844, Patrick had been long free of his sponsor. He was restless, and kept hearing of more opportunity further north. At Moreton Bay, six hundred miles away, the former convict settlement had received a population boost when it began selling town allotments, and the promoters and traders who seized that opportunity were short of labour. Assigned convicts were no longer available, so they sought free men from Port Jackson. Mayne contracted to come north and work for £1 a week for John ‘‘Tinker’’ Campbell at the slaughterhouse and boiling-down works newly erected at Kangaroo Point. This was one of three rough settlements sprawling along the banks of the Brisbane River. The somewhat swampy South Brisbane and the higher Kangaroo Point faced North Brisbane across the water; each settlement, pushed by its investors, vied to become the trading heart of Brisbane. The investors were in a hurry to obliterate the signs and stigma of the old penal colony of Moreton Bay, and to grow rich on the wealth of wool, hides, meat and cedar brought to Brisbane on the hoof, or piled high on creaking bullock wagons that laboured over range and plain from somewhere in the blue distance.
    If Sydney had been a new world after Ireland, Moreton Bay bore scant resemblance to any sort of civilisation Patrick had known. It was a frontier settlement with little resemblance to a town. Each dun-coloured hamlet, carved out of the harsh surrounding scrub, was a scattered rough-and-ready mish-mash of slab or wattle-and-daub box-like cottages and shops, some mere shacks, all widely separated by rutted, dusty tracks. They were rooted like a mouldy excrescence on the bare brown earth, a future threat to the vigour of the forest-clad hills surrounding them. At North Brisbane, two substantial buildings, the Commissariat stores and the Court House, left over from the penal years, imposed a dubious authority. Each hamlet had its well-patronised, mostly disorderly hotels, eager to attract and succour the tired and thirsty bush traveller, who, after weeks of sleeping in a swag, thankfully melted into the company of the rowdy mob in the bar.
    Ships, when they came, were the lifeblood of Moreton Bay. When the river steamers docked and unloaded at the Queen’s wharf at North Brisbane, the precious outgoing cargo of produce that had been brought overland to Brisbane with such difficulty had to be ferried across. The dray traffic terminated at South Brisbane. The only links between Kangaroo Point and South Brisbane and their cross-river rival on the north bank were the boatmen with their ferries. These two southbank communities should have enjoyed a trading edge over North Brisbane: they were on the direct route to the inland, the Darling Downs, and the long overland haul to Sydney—but the race forsupremacy was very much in the hands of the entrepreneurial capitalists. The rivalry between the three areas provided a climate of challenge. The lucky break for the smart and the hopeful must lie close at hand.
    In the mid-1840s, when Patrick Mayne arrived at Kangaroo Point, that area appeared to be gaining a commercial advantage. The high-flying investor Evan Mackenzie had built the boiling-down works and added a new wharf strong enough for the ships from the Hunter River Steam Navigation Company to berth and load cargo. For a time the wagons bypassed South Brisbane and brought trade to the Point. It seemed that Patrick had come into an area where