The secret to a long life: ''eating well'' and keeping her mind sharp by reading.
In Mrs Mayo's (nee Audrey-Rutherford) early life she moved around with her family due to her father's job as a ship's engineer - from Sydney to Auckland to Gisborne to Dunedin in a relatively short time.
When she was 5 she contracted polio which made life ''very hard'' for a few years. It interrupted her schooling, but Mrs Mayo put up a fight.
She received treatment in Wellington and got through the worst of the polio before the family moved to Dunedin.
As a teenager, she attended Otago Girls' High School. During that time she was hit by a car in a serious accident near Moray Pl. She required skin grafts and her schooling was further interrupted.
She got through that, too. When she left school she started working at the port, doing costings on ship repairs- a ''very interesting job''.
In a chance encounter, she met her husband, John Mayo, in Norfolk Island while on holiday.
''I heard this very nice English accent coming from a man getting out of a taxi . . .''
Mr Mayo was in Norfolk Island studying botany. The pair married there in 1949 and stayed for about two and a-half years. Later they moved to England for about 30 years, where Mrs Mayo spent a lot of her time ''being a mother and raising our son right, making sure he had a good education''.
She has done well - son Mike Mayo studied at Cambridge University and now runs a ''liquid robotics'' business in San Francisco. He and wife Nancy have made the trip to Dunedin to celebrate the big 100.
Their son, Stuart Mayo, is studying data science at the University of California, Berkeley- carrying on the family lineage of sharp minds.
Mrs Mayo has been witness to massive advances in society- the most amazing to her being the digital age of computers and ''gadgets'', although the planes got a mention, too.
She has seen many parts of the world including Singapore and Hong Kong; she used to visit her son in the United States every year, and has made the trip back and forth from New Zealand to England several times by both boat and later plane.
These days Mrs Mayo likes to read more than anything else, going through a book a day at her residence at Leslie Groves Hospital in Dunedin and keeping the nurses on their toes.
