Moira Mayo (nee Hardy) working on the poppy plantation at the Dickson Experiment Station in the 1940s. Photo: Garry Mayo.
Garry and Kevin Mayo have a strange turn in Canberra’s history to thank for their existence – their mother and father first met at an opium poppy plantation where the Inner North suburb of Dickson stands today.
We’re not making that up. We went through the backstory to the Dickson Experiment Station in a recent piece of historic gold.
To recap… During World War II, Australia was under pressure to produce its own pain medication for its troops on the front line.
By 1943, 28 poppy plantations had been established across every Australian state and territory except Western Australia, churning out a combined 160 kg of morphine every year.
In Canberra, the Commonwealth Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) – forerunner to the CSIRO – was growing poppies on its 640-acre research station, comprising most of today’s suburbs of Dickson and Downer and a small part of Watson.
Its mission was to find faster, more direct ways to extract morphine from poppy seeds.
This history led the ACT Government to recently change the name of Dickson Place to Poppyfield Street (a move largely championed by the Dickson Residents Association).
But it turns out opium production wasn’t the only industry going on in Canberra.
An aerial view from Mount Ainslie looking northwest along Hawdon Street to the Dickson Experiment Station of CSIRO in 1953. Photo: Libraries ACT.
“My mother worked at CSIRO starting way back in the 1940s and certainly worked on the poppies back then,” Kevin recalls.
“She didn’t talk much about it, not because it was a forbidden subject or anything. It’s just: ‘What did you do you when you were younger? Oh, I grew opium’ – it’s not really a conversation starter.”
Moira Hardy grew up in Bega but moved to Canberra when her father, a mechanic within the Defence force, was posted in the national capital.
Les Mayo hails from one of Canberra’s oldest families – the first Mayo arrived as a convict in the second half of the 1800s and worked on one of Robert Campbell’s sheep stations.
Moira Mayo (nee Hardy). Photo: Garry Mayo.
Neither parent of Garry and Kevin talked much about their work, so it’s been up to them to research it by trawling records kept by the National Archives of Australia and Australian War Memorial.
It took two years to pull together, but the sons printed the results in a privately published book entitled Dad’s War, kept by the War Memorial.
Along the way they uncovered photos of Moira picking bunches of poppies from a field, Black Mountain just visible in the distance.
In another photo, she’s at a workbench inside what appears to be a lab, weighing vials of liquid. Metal cans marked “drugs” are stacked up towards the back of the bench.
Moira Hardy worked at the Dickson Experiment Station until she married Les Mayo. Photo: Garry Mayo.
The sons agree their parents “definitely” met at the Dickson Experiment Station.
Moira finished up work when the two married, but Les remained on after the war and poppy growing to take charge of the station’s National Biological Standards Laboratories (NBSL).
“Their charter was to test batches of drugs created by what was the then Commonwealth Serum Laboratory, or CSL, initially in the basement of what’s now the National Film and Sound Archive and the buildings in what became today’s Downer Shops,” Kevin says.
“They did drug testing there and my father was in charge of the animal breeding section which housed the animals these drugs would be tested on.”
Every summer, over the school holiday break, Kevin joined his dad at the labs and helped clean out the animal cages.
“They had about 2000 rats kept in little stainless steel tins with wire tops, and water and food provided with sawdust in the bottom. These had to be changed twice a week. Similarly for the mice.
“The rabbits were on raised wire cages with stainless steel trays and these had to be cleaned out every day … CSIRO ordered a breed of American rabbits called ‘Long Ears’ … because they thought it would be easier to extract blood samples from the ears.”
Les died at the age of 47, partly due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) complications from his time serving in Papua New Guinea during WWII. Liver cancer took Moira at age 63.
In the field of poppies. Photo: Garry Mayo.
The sons ultimately blame their parents for their fascination with science.
Garry went on to earn a degree in ecology from the Australian National University (ANU) and work on a host of Australian botany and zoology projects (including in Antarctica). Today, he calls Tuggeranong home.
Kevin worked with CSIRO for years and lives on the South Coast.
“We literally have the poppy fields to thank,” Kevin says.
