In the early hours of 9 October 1891, the ceremonial mace vanished from Parliament House in Melbourne, the silver-plated symbol of the speaker’s authority gone from a locked case. A parliamentary engineer was seen that same day running from the building with a parcel the right size and shape to be the mace; he told police it was firewood, and with no proof against him the investigation stalled.
Thirteen months later newspapers claimed the mace had turned up in the parlour of a notorious madam who catered to visiting members of parliament, a story so delicious it triggered a formal Board of Inquiry. The board cleared the brothel but settled nothing else, and popular rumour simply shifted the blame onto the new Speaker, Thomas Bent, despite his having taken office only after the theft. The mace was never seen again, and whether it was a burglary or a parliamentary prank gone wrong remains Melbourne’s favourite unsolved mystery.
