Evelyn Joyce Marston (née Carrington)

Trevallyn

Evelyn Joyce Carrington was born at 4:05 am on 8 November 1947 in Launceston, the youngest of three daughters of Thomas Henry Carrington and Grace Elizabeth Carrington née Mitchell. Her father, born in 1915, was a clerk with the Commonwealth Bank, a steady, careful man who had not been accepted for war service because of his eyesight and never quite stopped apologising for it. Her mother, born in 1917, had nursed at the Launceston General Hospital until her marriage. The family lived in a small brick house in Trevallyn, above the Cataract Gorge, which Thomas paid off a year early.

Her sisters were older and sure of their futures. Margaret Ruth Carrington, born in 1943, followed their mother into nursing. Dorothy Jean Carrington, born in 1945, trained as a secretary and married at twenty. Evelyn was the bookish one. She read at the table, under the blankets and in the bath, and she decided at nine that she would be a teacher, which nobody in the family took seriously until she was fifteen and still saying it.

The household valued education and could afford a limited amount of it. Thomas read Dickens aloud on winter evenings and expected his daughters to listen. Grace made sure each of them could play the piano a little and recite a poem when visitors called. Evelyn was the one who liked it. She won a partial scholarship to a Church of England girls' school in Launceston in 1960 and stayed there until 1965. She did well in English and history and poorly in mathematics, which she found baffling all her life.

Her English teacher, Miss Constance Fairweather, was the first adult outside the family to take her seriously. Fairweather lent her books, argued with her about them and wrote the reference that got her into the Launceston Teachers' College. Thomas worried about the cost. Grace told him to stop worrying, and he did.

Invermay

Evelyn entered the Teachers' College in 1966. The two-year course suited her: half theory, half practice, and full of young women who, like her, had been told teaching was a respectable thing to do until they married. Several of them had no intention of stopping. Evelyn was one.

Her final placement, in 1967, was at Invermay Primary School, in the low-lying working suburb on the Tamar flats. She had not seen poverty up close before. Some of the children came to school without breakfast or proper shoes. Some could not read at ten. She learned that term that she was good at reaching children nobody else had bothered with, and that she needed to be needed, which was a less comfortable discovery.

She graduated with distinction in December 1967. She had offers from schools in Launceston and Hobart and took a position at Burnie Primary School instead, in an industrial town where she knew no one, because, she told her parents, that was where teachers were needed. Her mother understood. Her father thought she was being stubborn, which she was.

Burnie

She arrived in Burnie in January 1968 and took a room with Mrs Henrietta Pask, a widow on Mount Street who let rooms to young teachers and kept a list of rules on the back of every door. Evelyn found the town ugly at first and then, within a year, did not notice. Her Year 3 class that first year had thirty-two children, most of them the sons and daughters of mill workers, dockers and fishermen. She taught them to read through stories, and she taught them everything else the same way.

Her closest friend at the school was Lorna Bettridge, a Year 6 teacher fifteen years older who had been widowed in her thirties and smoked on the back step at lunchtime in defiance of the principal. Lorna told Evelyn which parents to worry about and which inspectors to ignore, and she was the first person Evelyn told when she became engaged. Lorna said she hoped Evelyn knew what she was doing. They remained friends until Lorna's death in 1996, and Evelyn spoke at her funeral.

In 1969 one of the children in her class was a six-year-old called Peter Marston, the son of a wharf labourer named James Marston. In March 1970 Peter's aunt Beverley, who had come to a school concert and liked the young teacher, took her brother Geoffrey to the Burnie Show and introduced him to Evelyn at the school's stand.

Geoffrey Walter Marston was a fisherman of twenty-five who talked very little and read nothing. He told her within five minutes that she was too clever for her own good, and she told him he was rude. Over the following months he kept finding reasons to be at the school. She kept finding that she was pleased when he was. He knew every bird on the coast by its call and described the strait at dawn in a way that surprised her. Under the gruffness she found a man who was frightened of a great many things and had decided long ago never to show any of them.

He proposed in September 1971 with his grandmother's ring, and they married at St George's Anglican Church in Burnie on 27 December 1971. The Carringtons came up from Launceston in their good clothes. The Marstons came in hired suits. Evelyn spent the reception moving between the two sides of the hall making each feel welcome, and that, her sister Dorothy said afterwards, was going to be her life.

Marine Terrace

In 1972 they bought a weatherboard house on Marine Terrace, three streets back from the water. David Geoffrey Marston was born on 5 May 1973. Evelyn took six weeks' leave, the most the Education Department allowed if she wanted her position kept, and went back to Burnie Primary with David in the care of Geoffrey's mother, Margaret Rose Marston, during school hours. Margaret Anne Marston followed on 19 August 1975 and Catherine Louise Marston on 2 February 1978. Geoffrey was at sea for both births. Evelyn taught part-time from 1975 until Catherine started school in 1983.

Her mother-in-law was the unexpected ally of those years. Margaret Rose Marston had raised three children in a cottage that flooded every winter, on the wages of a man who drank, and she had no illusions about Marston men. She minded the children without complaint, taught Evelyn to cook the plain food Geoffrey would eat, and told her plainly, the week after David was born, that her son would be a hard husband and that Evelyn should keep her job whatever he said. Evelyn did. When Margaret Rose died in 1999 it was Evelyn, not Geoffrey, who sat with her at the end.

The house ran on Geoffrey's absences. When the Steady Return was out, Evelyn kept a loose, warm home where the children read at the table and argued at dinner. When Geoffrey came back it went quiet. Evelyn managed the change twice a month for twenty years. She softened his judgements where she could, translated his silences for the children, and took David into her classroom after school, where he helped her stack chairs and read with the slower children and became, for an hour at a time, someone his father did not see.

She did not always protect them. She chose her arguments with Geoffrey carefully and let a great deal go. Her daughters noticed that their father's expectations fell mostly on their brother and that their mother did little to redirect them. Margaret, in particular, held it against her.

The Letter

The scallop fishery collapsed in the early 1980s, and with it most of Geoffrey's income. He did not tell her. In October 1984 a letter from the bank arrived addressed to Mrs E. J. Marston, setting out arrears on a loan secured against the house she had not known was mortgaged a second time. She read it at the kitchen table and left it on his plate.

She did not shout. The following week she went to the bank herself in her school clothes, restructured the loan against her own salary, and came home and took over the household accounts. She kept them for the rest of her marriage. Geoffrey let her. It was the closest their marriage came to ending, and neither of them ever mentioned it again.

In June 1986 Geoffrey's deckhand, a nineteen-year-old named Wayne Coates, was washed overboard off Rocky Cape and drowned. Geoffrey came home that night and sat in the shed. Evelyn went out to him with a cup of tea and found him unable to speak. She was the only person he ever told the full story to, and he did not tell her until 2004. In the meantime she watched him grow harder with the children, understood why, and could not explain it to them without breaking a confidence he had never actually given.

Burnie Primary

Her teaching was the part of her life she was surest of. She was patient, demanding and good at noticing the child who was falling behind for reasons that had nothing to do with ability. In 1983 she started a breakfast programme at Burnie Primary with bread and milk paid for out of her own pocket, after realising that a third of her class arrived hungry. The principal, Gordon McKenzie, complained about the crumbs and then, two years later, found the programme a budget.

She ran after-school reading clubs that were partly reading clubs and partly a place for children to be when home was difficult. She taught at the school for thirty-three years, through three principals and four curriculum overhauls, and she had a reputation among younger staff for being kind and immovable. When the department tried to transfer her to Wynyard in 1992 to fill a vacancy, she declined, and kept declining until they gave up.

She had one failure she did not forgive herself for. In the winter of 1990 David, seventeen, told the family at dinner that he was thinking of becoming a teacher. Geoffrey said that teaching was women's work. Evelyn, who had taught for twenty-two years, said nothing. She told herself that she would talk to David later, privately, and she did. But the moment at the table had been the one that mattered, and David never quite forgave her for it.

Grandmother

Evelyn retired from Burnie Primary School at the end of 2001. David's daughter was born in Hobart on 14 March 2002 and named Grace Evelyn Marston, after both her grandmothers. Evelyn wept when she heard. Samuel Geoffrey Marston followed on 22 November 2005.

She was a better grandmother than she had been a mother, and she knew it. She had more time and fewer fears. The grandchildren spent part of every January at Marine Terrace, and she taught Grace to draw floor plans of imaginary houses and Samuel to identify the shells on the beach below the town. She watched Geoffrey become gentle with them in ways he had never been with his own children, and she found she was glad rather than bitter.

Retirement changed the marriage as well. With Evelyn home all day and Geoffrey home more often, they were together for longer stretches than at any time since their courtship, and for the first year they did not manage it well. Then, on a wet evening in the winter of 2004, Geoffrey told her about Rocky Cape: the sea over the stern, the two hours of searching, the lifejacket he had not insisted on. He talked for most of the night. Evelyn listened and did not try to make it better. Afterwards, she noticed, he was easier with her, and she with him, than they had been in thirty years.

David's wife, Alice, became something close to a friend. They wrote to each other, about books and about David, whom Evelyn understood better than anyone. When Alice stayed at Marine Terrace, Evelyn put her in David's old room and left the shoebox of his school reports in the wardrobe where she would find it. Neither of them ever mentioned it.

Sisters and Daughters

Her parents died in Launceston, Thomas of a stroke in 1988 and Grace, after a long decline, in 2003. Her sister Margaret died of cancer in 2018. Dorothy, widowed and still in Launceston, telephoned every Sunday, and the two sisters became closer in their seventies than they had been in their twenties.

Her own daughters gave her more trouble. Margaret, who went to art school in Hobart and became a printmaker, kept her mother at a careful distance for most of her adult life and said, in an argument in 2009, that Evelyn had spent her life keeping the peace for a man who did not deserve it. Evelyn did not disagree. Catherine, the youngest, became a veterinary nurse in Devonport and stayed close. She visited every fortnight and was the one who saw, before anyone else, that her mother was tired.

The Garden

Geoffrey sold the Steady Return in 2013 when arthritis had taken his hands, and spent the following decade at home, restless and often angry with his own body. Evelyn gave him the vegetable garden and the grandchildren's visits, and kept him going. In July 2023 he fell in the garden moving a wheelbarrow she had told him to leave, broke his hip and developed pneumonia in hospital. She sat with him for two weeks. He died on 4 August 2023 with Evelyn, David, Margaret and Catherine in the room. At the wake she took Alice aside and thanked her for her son.

She did not move. She stayed on Marine Terrace and kept the garden, now hers entirely, and grew more vegetables than one woman could eat and gave them away along the street. Former pupils, by then in their fifties and sixties, still stopped her outside the supermarket to tell her what she had done for them. She usually remembered their names.

Widowhood was harder than she had expected. For fifty years the house had been organised around Geoffrey's comings and goings, and without them she did not know when to eat or when to go to bed. For the first few months she left the radio on all day. Catherine taught her to use a tablet so she could see the grandchildren on video calls, and she joined a reading group at the Burnie library that met on Tuesday mornings and argued about books in a way she had not done since Teachers' College. By the end of 2024 she was running it.

David drove up from Hobart once a month after his father's death and sat in the kitchen with her longer than he ever had before. In 2025, on one of those visits, he asked her about the dinner in 1990. She told him she had been wrong, and that she had known it at the time. He said he knew. In November 2026 she turned seventy-nine, still living alone on Marine Terrace, and still teaching Samuel the names of shells he had known for twenty years.