Scandal and mystery have always surrounded the Maynes, a wealthy Brisbane family. Opening with a macabre mid-nineteenth-century murder, this history unfolds like a gothic tale. The family patriarch Patrick Mayne, a migrant from famine stricken Ireland, came to the Moreton Bay Settlement to find a better life. Subsequently a Queen Street butcher, successful property speculator and town councillor, he died in disgrace for a murder he was never actually accused of committing. But was it the murder victim's stolen money which founded Patrick's business empire? With the generation that followed, equally sordid accusations were to brand the family as outcasts despite their social rank and prosperity. They lived as exiles in their last home Moorlands, a heritage-listed landmark overlooking the Brisbane River at Toowong. Family members struggled for years to redeem the family name. James and Mary, the last descendants, bequeathed the total Mayne inheritance to the fledgling University of Queensland. Detective-like, the author has sifted through numerous archives, newspapers and letters to tell this extraordinary story, in which gossip and infamy have for so long obscured the truth.
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