The Daphne Mayo Collection / Home
A Significant Woman of Her Time

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"Miss Michelangelo", ABC Weekly, 12 April 1941
UQFL119_pic002

The Daphne Mayo Collection, housed in the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, includes personal and professional correspondence, manuscripts, artworks, sketchbooks, sculptures, tools, photographs, books, art exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings, minutes, financial files, hand-written notes and ephemera.

Judith McKay, art historian and Daphne Mayo scholar, met Mayo while working on her thesis at the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney in the 1970s. She was largely responsible for securing the collection for the Fryer Library.

This material bequeathed following Mayo’s death in 1982, is a highly valued contribution to Fryer’s collection. It is considered one of its great bequests. The collection was acquired in March, 1985, the year of the University of Queensland’s 75th Anniversary.

Fryer welcomes researchers, art historians, academic staff, students and the general public to view the collection to appreciate Mayo’s extraordinary artistic output and her strong public commitment to Queensland art.

Correspondence within the collection also reflects the very close and loving relationship between Mayo and her parents and their enduring support for her. Their encouragement of her artistic professional career was unceasing, despite their ill health in later years.
Mayo succeeded as a professional sculptor in Queensland, a state known for its lack of art patronage during the 1920s and 1930s. She is particularly known for her large monumental works and is acknowledged, alongside her close friend artist Vida Lahey, as a leading advocate for art in Queensland.

Judith McKay credits Mayo as:

... Queensland’s pioneer woman sculptor and leading public art figure ... the Australian woman sculptor who carved the largest monuments in situ, as one of Australia's few sculptors who have sustained themselves from their sculptural commissions, as the local artist who transformed the backward artistic opportunities of her State, and as a significant woman of her time. [1]

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Tattersalls Frieze
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Above: Blue and cream frieze, Tattersall’s Club, Brisbane.
Mark Sherwood photographer
Reproduced here with the kind permission of Tattersall’s Club, Brisbane.
Mayo’s fierce determination to be not only a highly acclaimed sculptor and artist, but financially independent as well, is revealed in her personal financial files. These reflect her business acumen. They evidence her tenacity in purchasing rental properties and shares, including blocks of flats in Spring Hill and Highgate Hill. They provide another insight into Mayo’s single mindedness in securing her personal and professional way of life.

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