When she installed the wreck of a Corolla Ascent Seca - which she filled with empty milk bottles, soil, turf, lomandra and gymea lily - at the University of Newcastle's P2 carpark at Callaghan this week, she made sure to attach a lockable perspex box to display her daily parking ticket.

"It's symbolic and pragmatic," Ms Jordan-Wills said.

"I feel as though I'm temporarily reclaiming the space for the traditional owners. But it's also so I don't cop a parking fine - the inspectors are ruthless!"

Ms Jordan-Wills is in the final year of her Bachelor of Teaching (Fine Arts) (Honours) degree and created the artwork, Carpark, as part of a subject called site-specific sculpture.

"I didn't know how much awareness there was about the traditional owners of the land that the university now sits on and I wasn't particularly aware until I started to look into it," she said.

"But when I did, I read so many things I couldn't ignore - about how when the early colonists came to this area [the Hunter] they drove out the original inhabitants of the land and the numbers dwindled until there weren't any Indigenous people local to the area left anymore.

"I read the Pambalong clan were driven into swamps and shot.

"I also read there were Aboriginal people living on the site of the university until the 1960s.

"I'm aware how many people complain about the carpark, it's a real issue.

"They want to park their piece of metal and get to where they need to be.

"It was such a disconnect between the history of that land and people's expectations about the convenience of a parking space that I wanted to bring those two things together."

She said the native plants represented the Indigenous people, while the introduced grass species was symbolic of the non-Indigenous population.

The perspex box has a QR code, which viewers can scan for a link to Professor John Maynard's research paper Whose Traditional Lands.

Ms Jordan-Wills said she invited Wollotuka Institute staff and students to come and see the artwork and they responded positively.

"The Facebook page Bad Parkers of UON has blown up with questions about it, but the Aboriginal people in Wollotuka know about it. It's reflective of the traditional knowledge of Aboriginal people, they have wisdom but everyone else is in the dark. There's something sweet about that for me."

She said it had been "delicious" to watch people's reactions.

"I know a lot of people won't look any further than the surface level.

"But for the few that do? They're the ones I'm really talking to. I hope they ask questions.

"Maybe it will spark some curiosity in someone who would not normally care about it."

She will start to dismantle the work on Saturday.