Marjorie Liddy
Australian indigenous elder and artist
Marjorie Liddy (17 October 1932 – 23 August 2016) was an Indigenous Australian elder and artist from the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory. She designed the image approved by the Vatican that became the international symbol of World Youth Day 2008.
Early life and education
Marjorie Dunn Liddy was born on 17 October 1932. She was a Tiwi Islands woman who was raised by Catholic nuns on the Garden Point Mission, Pirlangimpi on Melville Island in the Northern Territory. The mission had been founded in 1941 by the Roman Catholic Missionaries of the Sacred Heart as a home for mixed-blood children, including those stolen from their indigenous families in other parts of the Northern Territory.
Career
Liddy designed the image that was widely used in Pope Benedict XVI's visit to World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney. Commonly known as Marjorie's Bird, the image was used on the back of chasubles worn at the Papal Mass. Liddy herself called the image "The Day the Holy Spirit Visited Marjorie and Her People", with "her people" intended to mean all the people of Australia. Liddy was part of a group of indigenous women who formed a guard of honour for the Pope at World Youth Day. Liddy had not painted before she created the image, which was a white dot bird on a navy background.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marjorie Liddy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.