Alice Catherine Marston (née Hughes)

The Second Daughter

Alice Catherine Hughes was born at 2:40 pm on 17 September 1975 at Calvary Hospital in Hobart, the second daughter of Robert James Hughes and Margaret Grace Hughes née Lyall. Her father, born in 1943, was a chartered accountant with the Tasmanian State Service who spent his whole career in the Treasury building on Murray Street. Her mother, born in 1946, had worked as a medical records clerk at the Royal Hobart Hospital until her first pregnancy and did not go back. The family lived in a brick house in Bellerive with a view across the river to the city, which Robert reached each morning over the Tasman Bridge.

Her sister, Jennifer Louise Hughes, was three years older and the family's project. Jennifer was quick, competitive and sure of herself, and by the time Alice was old enough to notice, the household had organised itself around her results. Alice did not resent this as a child. It left her alone, which she preferred.

The Hughes house was orderly and quiet. Robert did the Mercury crossword each evening in fountain pen. Margaret kept up a large correspondence with relatives on the mainland and corrected the grammar in letters she received. There were books in every room, and nobody minded what the girls read so long as they read something. Alice read everything, slowly and in order, and kept a list in an exercise book of every title she finished. By the age of twelve the list ran to four hundred and seven books.

Bellerive and Rosny

She went to Bellerive Primary School from 1981 and to Clarence High School from 1988, then to Rosny College for her final two years. Her reports were steady rather than brilliant. Teachers praised her concentration and her reading and noted that she rarely spoke in class unless asked. She was strong in English and history and adequate at everything else. Jennifer, who had topped the state in chemistry two years earlier, regarded her younger sister's results with mild pity, and said so.

Alice had two close friends at Rosny, both of whom left Tasmania after college. She had a boyfriend in her final year, a quiet boy called Mark Ellery who played the double bass in the college orchestra, and broke up with him by letter the week before he left for the Conservatorium in Melbourne. She was never comfortable with confrontation and learned early that most difficulties could be managed without one.

Jennifer left for medicine at the University of Tasmania in 1990 and for her surgical training in Melbourne four years later. After that she came home at Christmas and not often otherwise. The house grew quieter. Alice, still at home, became the daughter who was there: who drove her father to his cricket on Saturdays when his eyesight began to fail at night, who helped her mother with the garden, who noticed things.

Information Management

She enrolled in information management at the University of Tasmania in 1994. Her parents approved of it as sensible. Jennifer, on the telephone from Melbourne, asked why she was not doing something more ambitious. Alice did not answer and did not forget the question.

The course suited her. She liked classification, the logic of catalogues and the way a well-built system let a stranger find what they needed without help. In her honours year in 1997 she wrote a thesis on how children's borrowing patterns at three Hobart libraries changed between the ages of five and twelve, built from loan records she spent months extracting by hand.

Her practicum that year was in the children's section of the Hobart City Library, under the Head Children's Librarian, Dorothy Pryce. Pryce was blunt, untidy and devoted to her work, and she taught Alice that a children's librarian's real job was not books but children: noticing the one who came in every day after school and never borrowed anything, and finding out why. When the library advertised for an assistant children's librarian at the start of 1998, Pryce told Alice to apply, and she was appointed.

The Detective

On 15 April 1998, three months into the job, Alice represented the library at a community consultation on youth crime held in its own meeting room. Tasmania Police sent a detective constable from the Criminal Investigation Branch named David Geoffrey Marston. He presented a set of statistics on juvenile offending and literacy. She thought his conclusions went further than his figures and said so, politely, in front of the room.

He asked her for coffee afterwards to continue the argument. She went because she wanted to win it. They spent two hours in a café on Elizabeth Street, and by the end of it she had conceded nothing and agreed to see him again.

David was two years older, from Burnie, and unlike anyone she had known. He was rigid, precise and humourless about anything that mattered to him, and he planned their outings with a thoroughness she found funny. He was also honest to the point of discomfort, and he listened to her as though what she said would be tested later. They played chess in the evenings. She lost, nearly always, and did not mind. On weekends they walked the tracks on kunanyi, and he named the plants for her in an order she later realised he had memorised the night before.

They married on 27 November 1999 at St David's Cathedral in Hobart. Jennifer flew down from Melbourne, newly separated from her first husband and in no mood for weddings, and made a toast that went on too long. David's parents came from Burnie: his father uncomfortable in a hired suit, his mother warm and curious and determined to like everyone. The reception was held at Wrest Point. Alice had planned it to the quarter-hour, and it ran to time.

Lenah Valley

David had been renting a flat in New Town, furnished like a barracks. In 2000 they bought a weatherboard house in Lenah Valley with a long back garden that ran up towards the bush, and Alice spent the next two years making it habitable. She added bookshelves, colour and plants. David did not object to any of it as long as nothing was left on the bench.

Grace Evelyn Marston was born on 14 March 2002 after an eighteen-hour labour at Calvary. David, by then a detective sergeant, handled it badly. He asked the midwives for regular updates as though they were reporting to him, and eventually Alice told him to go and get a coffee. When he came back, Grace had been born, and he held her with an expression Alice had never seen on him before and did not see often afterwards.

The argument came the following year. Alice had always intended to go back to work. David had assumed, without ever saying so, that she would not, as his own mother very nearly had not. When she told him she was returning three days a week and that Grace would go to family day care, he objected, and for a week the house was silent. It was the worst argument of their marriage. She won it by refusing to have it again, and she went back to the library in February 2003. Something between them shifted that year and did not shift back. He accepted her work. He did not ask about it for a long time.

Samuel Geoffrey Marston was born on 22 November 2005. He was a quiet, absorbed baby who grew into a quiet, absorbed boy, and from the beginning Alice protected him from his father's expectations in a way she had not needed to with Grace. Grace was like David: exacting, anxious to be right, upset by her own mistakes. Samuel was like no one in the family. He collected shells, read about whales, and did his homework in his own time and his own order, and Alice spent much of his childhood explaining him to his father.

The Children's Floor

Dorothy Pryce retired in 2008, and Alice was appointed Senior Children's Librarian in her place. She went full-time the same year. It was the position she had wanted since her practicum, and she was good at it. She rebuilt the junior collection around reading development rather than age bands, set aside a quiet room off the main floor for children who found the library's noise overwhelming, and started a literacy programme for parents who had never been read to themselves and did not know how to begin.

Her best work rarely appeared in any report. In 2009 she noticed a boy of about ten who came to the children's floor every afternoon at half past three, sat in the same beanbag until closing and never borrowed anything. It took her three weeks to learn that his mother worked late shifts at a nursing home in Glenorchy, that he had nowhere else to go, and that he could not read well enough to choose a book without being found out. She did not tell anyone. She left books on the beanbag, a little below his age, and moved them up a level every month. By the end of the year he had a library card. She thought about him for a long time afterwards, and she never learned his surname.

She was less good at the politics of the job. When the council proposed cutting the children's programme budget in 2012, she spent three weeks assembling usage figures and presented them so thoroughly that the cuts were withdrawn. She also made an enemy of the branch manager by doing it without consulting him, and he did not forget.

In 2019, when the state's libraries were restructured, the same manager encouraged her to apply for a new regional coordinator's role. She did not apply. She told herself she did not want to leave the children's floor, which was partly true. The position went to a younger colleague from Launceston whom Alice regarded as more ambitious than capable, and she spent the next year being scrupulously helpful to him and privately furious with herself.

Fathers

Robert Hughes retired from Treasury in 2004 and spent his last years in the garden at Bellerive and at the cricket. He died of a heart attack on 3 March 2016, in his chair, with the crossword half done. He was seventy-two. Alice found him. She had driven over that afternoon with a bag of lemons from her tree.

She handled it badly, by her own standards. She organised the funeral, managed the estate and dealt with the bank, and for months afterwards could not read more than a page at a time. David did not know what to do for her and did what he knew, which was to take over the practical tasks she had already finished. Jennifer flew in for the funeral, stayed four days and flew out again. The two sisters argued in their mother's kitchen on the third night about whether Margaret should stay in the Bellerive house alone. Alice said she should. Jennifer said Alice would end up doing all the work. They were both right.

The sisters were never close again in the way they had been briefly in their twenties. Jennifer remarried in 2011, an anaesthetist named Paul Varley, and had no children. She was generous with money and sparing with her time, and she sent expensive presents to Grace and Samuel at Christmas that Alice found difficult to thank her for. When their mother had a fall in 2021, it was Alice who spent the night in the emergency department at the Royal Hobart, and Jennifer who rang the next morning to ask which specialist she had been seen by.

Alice's relationship with David's parents had been easier than she expected. Evelyn Marston became something close to a friend. They wrote to each other between visits, about books and about David, whom Evelyn understood better than anyone. Geoffrey Marston was harder. He found Alice too educated and too quiet, and she found him rude, until she asked him about fishing and listened to the answer for an hour. After that he was courteous to her and occasionally kind.

The children spent part of every summer in Burnie. Alice drove them up in the January holidays and stayed a week at Marine Terrace, sleeping in the room that had been David's and reading his old school reports, which Evelyn had kept in a shoebox in the wardrobe. They told her more about her husband than he ever had. She never mentioned to David that she had read them, and she suspected Evelyn had left them there for her on purpose.

When Geoffrey fell in his garden in July 2023 and was admitted to the hospital in Burnie with pneumonia, Alice handled the specialists, the medications and the calls from Hobart while Evelyn sat with him. She drove north with David for the last two days. Geoffrey died on 4 August 2023. At the wake Evelyn took Alice aside and thanked her for her son, which Alice did not entirely understand and did not ask about.

The Quiet Floor

The library closed its doors in March 2020 when the pandemic reached Tasmania. Alice moved her story times online within a week, reading from her own dining table in Lenah Valley to children she could not see. The sessions drew audiences from across the state and, for a few months, from well beyond it. She found the work strange and lonely and kept doing it until the doors reopened. David was working sixteen-hour days at headquarters through the same months, and they saw each other mostly in the kitchen late at night.

The years after the pandemic were harder on the marriage than any since 2003. David was passed over for promotion in 2021 and took it out on the people nearest him, Alice included. She managed him as she managed everything, by smoothing and waiting. It was Grace, then at the end of her second year at university, who told her mother that she had spent twenty years making excuses for her father and might try telling him to stop. Alice was hurt by it for a week. Then, in January, she told him. The conversation was difficult, and things improved after it.

Grace had studied architecture at the University of Tasmania and moved to Melbourne for work in 2024. Samuel went into marine biology at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies on the Hobart waterfront and spent long weeks at sea on research voyages. Alice listened to both of them more than she advised them, and both noticed.

Bellerive Again

Alice remained Senior Children's Librarian into her fifties. She had stopped expecting to be anything else and found she did not mind. In 2023 she began running reading sessions for older patrons, many of them living with dementia, built around the stories they had loved as children. It was the work she was proudest of in her later career, and she rarely mentioned it to anyone.

She also began, at last, to write. Her essay on what children's borrowing reveals about the households they come from was published in a professional library journal in 2024. David read it twice and told her it was well argued, which from him was high praise, and she kept the copy he had read on her bedside table.

Her mother, Margaret, turned eighty in 2026 and still lived alone in the Bellerive house. Alice drove over the bridge twice a week to see her, as Jennifer had predicted she would. Jennifer telephoned on Sundays from Melbourne. Alice and David still lived in Lenah Valley. They played chess some evenings, and she still lost, though by 2026 not as often.