Brisbane Arcade in Adelaide Street

We have a wonderful morning sketching in Adelaide Street and the Arcade this morning.  Brisbane Arcade has a scandalous History....

Brisbane Arcade was opened in March 1924. It was built for Dr James Mayne, and his sister Mary Emelia Mayne, their brother Isaac having purchased the site in 1892. Builders‎: ‎J & E L Rees, Forsyth & Speering designed by Richard Gailey Jnr

Irish immigrant and slaughterman Patrick Mayne arrived in the fledgling colony's Kangaroo Point in 1844 and married Mary McIntosh. Five years later, to the great surprise of friends, he invested sudden and unexplained wealth in a butcher's shop, adjoining coach-house and upstairs residence in a prime block on Brisbane's smart Queen St. The amount was paid in cash, and was the equivalent of about five years' slaughterman wages.

From there, Mayne set about acquiring a further 400ha of prime inner-city real estate. Despite the Maynes' affluence however, they were increasingly shunned by Brisbane's "more polite" society as Patrick's fits of insanity and alcohol-fuelled violence (he had a fondness for attacking perceived enemies with his stockwhip) grew more frequent.

Shockingly, in 1865, on his deathbed, more or less where the Colorado store sits on an arcade corner today, Mayne confessed that 17 years earlier he murdered a man and that someone else had been hanged for it.

The dead man was a drunken timber-gatherer named Robert Cox who'd foolishly boasted of his earnings from a big cedar find. Police maintained it was one of the most savage slayings they'd seen.

The man's legs and torso were found in the Brisbane River; his entrails were dumped in a well; and his severed head was propped up quite deliberately in a shed to gaze at whoever found it.

After Mayne's and Mary's deaths, their children became generous benefactors to churches and charities.

None of them married – some say fearing to pass on their father's madness – and they promptly tore down their parents' butcher shop and their childhood home.
In 1923, they built the Brisbane Arcade on the scandal-ridden site.

Three years later, in another apparently redemptive quest, Patrick's offspring bought land at St Lucia and donated it to the University of Queensland, with all profits from the Brisbane Arcade Trust going to support the university.

Today, Brisbane's most historic shopping precinct continues to be operated by the trustees of the estate of Dr James Mayne and Mary Emelia Mayne (Patrick's youngest two children), with proceeds to UQ's medical school.

 

 Sketched in my handmade sketchbook 7.5 x 6 inches, Lamy pen and watercolour

 

 

 There are five light posts along Adelaide Street, starting outside Office Works, that have bronze sculptures in the. Next time you are walking along there, look up. Sculpted by Fred Whitehouse 1996 there is a Possum - Flying Fox - Snake - Goanna - Birds.
Same sketchbook and  lamy pen.