It was late on a warm, Brisbane night in 1969 and 11 customs agents and burly plain clothes police officers were searching for pornography. “Open the door, or I’ll smash it in … ” Their suspect was a slight 74-year-old retiree named Daphne Mayo. They were about to find out she wasn’t easily intimidated. Growing up not far from the Brisbane River, Daphne’s early life had been both solidly middle-class and loving. Her father, an insurance executive, read calculus and philosophy. Her mother was the Queensland Naturalists’ Club’s first female member.
Constantly sketching, Daphne was lovingly nicknamed ‘Doodles’ by her older brother, Dick. Then, as chronic illness interrupted her schooling, she studied drawing at the Brisbane Central Technical College, where she immediately became fast friends with aspiring artist Lloyd Rees.
Lloyd (like many others) was smitten. “She was a short elfin-like creature, with a mass of golden locks and luminous blue eyes,. After Daphne won Queensland’s first publicly funded travelling art scholarship in 1914, at 19, the fresh-faced artist was hailed by Brisbane’s newspapers as a 17-year-old child prodigy and young heroine. However, the sculptor never corrected the reports and comfortably wore the mantle of the girl storming the boys’ club. World War I kept Daphne’s European travels on hold until 1919. Arriving in London, she fought tenaciously for acceptance to the Royal Academy of Arts. The Academy had not admitted a female student for more than 10 years. Fed up, she petitioned the Academy’s Council directly. She was accepted as a probationer sculptor and shortly after was awarded the Academy’s influential Landseer Scholarship.
