Mary Watson was twenty-one years old and had been married less than eighteen months when she died of thirst on No. 5 Island in the Howick Group off Cape Flattery in Far North Queensland in 1881. She, along with her four-month-old baby and a wounded Chinese workman, Ah Sam, had voyaged for eight days and some forty miles in a cut-down ship's water tank, used for boiling sea slugs, after mainland Aborigines had attacked two Chinese workmen at her absent husband's beche-de-mer station on Lizard Island.
It was assumed that she had been kidnapped and killed, and when the bodies were found some months later they were returned for a funeral which became Cooktown's biggest public event. Mary Watson, whose short diary describing their last days was found with the remains, became an emblem of pioneer heroism for many Queenslanders.
This story has since been retold in numerous accounts, many fanciful, and usually with little attention given to the Aboriginal and Chinese aspects of events. Alan Oldfield's series of paintings are his own interpretation of the meaning of Mary Watson's life, using the story as a spiritual metaphor, and also in a gesture of reconciliation of past misunderstandings.
