Mary Watson (pioneer)

Watson's story was subsequently retold in numerous newspaper and folk accounts, including heroic poems, usually with little attention given to the Aboriginal and Chinese aspect of the events.

[1] Having accepted a position as a governess with a hotelier's family, at the age of 18 she travelled from Maryborough to the isolated port of Cooktown, where she met and married a bêche de mer fisherman, Captain Robert F. Watson, in May 1880.

She, with her four-month-old baby, Ferrier, and a wounded Chinese workman, Ah Sam, had drifted for eight days and some forty miles in a cut-down ship's water tank, used for boiling sea slugs, after mainland Aboriginal people had attacked her absent husband's bêche de mer station on Lizard Island.

Mounted police and native troopers from Cooktown under Hervey Fitzgerald (who had just recently been reinstated after disciplinary action for whipping an Aboriginal woman, and promoted to Inspector) shot a number of coastal Cape York people from three mainland groups in retaliation.

[3] In the following years, Watson's story was retold in numerous newspaper and folk accounts, including heroic poems, usually with little attention given to the Aboriginal and Chinese aspects of the events.

[citation needed] The retribution killings devastated Aboriginal communities and their traditional economies in the region, which had already been affected by expanding agriculture and the discovery of gold, leading to the establishment of Cooktown in 1873.

[6] Five years after her death, a public subscription was raised to fund the Mary Watson's Monument, a marble drinking fountain on the main street, completed in 1886.

[2] A highly dramatic version of the story has been told by Australian author Ion Idriess in one of his a lesser-known titles The Opium Smugglers (1948), and was touched upon by Robert Drewe in his novel, The Savage Crows (1976).

[2] Australian painter Alan Oldfield's series of paintings The Story of Mrs Watson, 1881, begun in 1986 and exploring the spiritual dimensions of the events, are now in the permanent collection of the Cairns Art Gallery.