Mary Watson was the young wife of a beche-de-mer trader who boiled sea slugs for the Chinese market on Lizard Island, far to the north. In late 1881, while her husband was away, a violent confrontation drove her to flee the island in a cut-down iron boiling tank with her infant son Ferrier and a wounded Chinese worker, Ah Sam. They drifted for days and came ashore on a small island in the Howick group that had no fresh water. There they died, waiting for a passing ship that never stopped. Mary kept a diary to the end; her last entry, dated 11 October, records the baby still alive and the three of them nearly dead with thirst. When her words were made public, they moved a colony to grief. The western marble panel carries a verse: 'Five fearful days beneath the scorching glare / Her babe she nursed.'

In 1885 the people of Cooktown raised public subscriptions for a memorial, and the Ipswich monumental mason Ernest Greenway built it the following year for about 165 pounds. It is an ornate piece of late-Victorian sentiment: a painted concrete structure of plinth, square base, and tapering octagonal spire, topped with an acanthus-leaf finial. Shouldered arches frame each face, carved with floral relief and crowned by delicate hood moulds. The working fountains sit on the north and south sides; inscribed marble panels face east and west. The eastern panel names her plainly, 'IN MEMORIAM MRS WATSON, The Heroine of Lizard Island.' Curiously, the panels disagree about who was mayor when it was raised, naming both John Davis and Edward D'Arcy, a small muddle that later raised questions about how D'Arcy's name came to be carved there at all.

Read the monument closely and you notice an absence. Ah Sam, the young Chinese man who suffered and died beside Mary and her baby, sharing every hour of that doomed voyage, is nowhere on the stone. So is the other worker, Ah Leong, killed back on the island. The colonial society that raised this fountain could weep for a white mother and forget the men who died with her. The Queensland Heritage Register, which protects the monument today, names this omission directly, calling it a clear illustration of the racist attitudes of the time. To stand here now is to read two messages at once: the grief the town chose to record, and the loss it chose to leave out.

The monument is unusual in Queensland: the only known public memorial to an individual woman who was not a head of state. For more than a century it has anchored the streetscape of Charlotte Street, valued by Cooktown as both landmark and tourist draw. But heritage assessors are careful to note that it does more than honour a brave young mother. It also perpetuates a legend, one that long cast Mary's death as a simple story of frontier danger. The fuller truth, told from Lizard Island itself, is sadder and more complicated, a tragedy of two peoples who could not understand each other. The fountain keeps offering its water all the same, a quiet kindness on a busy street, asking everyone who drinks to remember a thirst that was never relieved.