The art lovers

Abstract

The feature film script The Art Lovers is the story of the struggles and the triumphs for an early Australian female artist, the ‘girl sculptress’, as Daphne Mayo was known in the early twentieth century, at a time when very few women took on this physically demanding occupation. This excerpt is from that feature screenplay and highlights the challenges she faced especially as an Australian within a rigid British culture when she was the only woman studying sculpture at the Royal Academy in London. Daphne Mayo is engaged in these scenes in a daily prosaic acculturated event, that of a morning breakfast in a patriarchal London establishment in 1923. The excerpt is inspired by a story that Daphne herself penned as prose and which was discovered during research conducted over months in the Fryer Collection of the University of Queensland. The Fryer holds almost 100 boxes of ephemera, newspaper stories as well as correspondence to, and from, Daphne Mayo. The nuance of the voices of all three of the lead characters included in this dramatic recreation, that is to say, those of Lloyd Rees, Vida Lahey and Daphne, were discovered by listening to the 1960s interviews conducted by ABC journalist Hazel de Berg. These interviews are lodged in the Oral History Section of the National Library of Australia in Canberra.