Lizard Island - The Journey of Mary Watson

This beautiful and hauntingly unusual book accurately details the tragic story of Mary Watson, a twenty-one year old mother who, with her tiny baby and a wounded Chinese workman, escaped a mainland aboriginal attack on her absent husband's beche-de-mer station on Lizard Island in Far North Queensland in 1881. They voyaged for eight days and forty miles in a cut-down ship's water tank used for boiling the sea slugs to die of thirst on No. 5 island in the Howick Group off Cape Flannery. When their bodies were discovered several months later, their remains together with Mary's diary were returned to Cooktown for a funeral that became the area's biggest public event for years as the entire town mourned. Alan Oldfield has done a series of superb paintings that are his own interpretation of Mary's life, using the story as a spiritual metaphor, and also in a gesture of reconciliation of past misunderstandings.