Marriage: Love and Law exhibition catalogue - Flipbook - Page 44
Artist Joan Ross became interested in the story of Maria Lock some
years ago. For Ross, the fact that Maria is buried in an unmarked
grave at St Bartholomew’s, Blacktown— alongside a major arterial
motorway in greater Western Sydney—belies the significance
of her story.
Ross considers Maria to have been ‘an outstanding Aboriginal
woman of her times’ who ‘showed amazing strength against the
prevailing patriarchal and imperial colonial system.’ Her work,
We watch from our unmarked graves, is a ‘representation of the
first official marriage of a European man to an Indigenous woman,
shown as a ceramic colonial figurine links arm with an ‘Aboriginal’
bride doll and music box.’
33 Joan Ross
We watch from our
unmarked graves
Mixed media
2008
Penrith Regional Gallery,
Lewers Bequest Collection
33
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