Geoffrey Walter Marston

Wivenhoe

Geoffrey Walter Marston was born at 11:20 pm on 12 March 1945 in Burnie, on the north-west coast of Tasmania, the second son of Walter James Marston and Margaret Rose Marston née Sullivan. His father, born in 1918, had come home from the war in the Pacific the year before with a shoulder too damaged for the fishing he had grown up expecting to do, and had taken work as a labourer on the Burnie wharves instead. His mother, born in 1921, took in washing and mending to stretch his wages. They lived in a rented weatherboard cottage in Wivenhoe, on the low ground by the mouth of the Emu River, where the river flooded the back yard most winters.

He had an elder brother, James Kenneth Marston, born in 1943, and in 1948 a sister, Beverley Anne Marston. The family's history on the coast went back three generations. Geoffrey's grandfather, Albert Geoffrey Marston, had owned a fishing boat out of Burnie until the creditors took it in 1934, and he spent the rest of his life working other men's boats and drinking on the strength of the loss. Walter inherited the disappointment and some of the drinking. He was not often violent, but on Friday nights after the pub the children learned to be in bed before he came through the door.

Burnie in the 1950s was a town of the Associated Pulp and Paper Mills, whose chimneys dominated the foreshore, and of the port, which was growing fast. Most of the men Geoffrey knew worked at one or the other. He grew up assuming he would too, and decided early that he would not. The mill meant shifts and the smell of sulphur. The wharves meant his father's life.

Marianne's Dream

He left school at fifteen in 1960 and spent three years doing whatever paid: deckhand on day boats, labourer at the wharves when his father could get him a start, a season on a cray boat out of Stanley. In 1963, aged eighteen, he went to work full-time for Hendrik Van Der Berg, a Dutch trawlerman everyone on the wharf called Dutch, who ran a forty-foot boat called Marianne's Dream out of Burnie.

Van Der Berg was sixty, careful and unsentimental, and he had been at sea since he was twelve. He taught Geoffrey to read weather from the colour of the strait and the behaviour of the birds, to listen to an engine before he trusted it, and to check every line twice. His rule was that the sea did not forgive stupidity, and he did not either. Geoffrey worked for him for eight years and modelled himself on him more completely than he ever modelled himself on his own father.

James had gone to the wharves at sixteen, as Walter had wanted. The brothers were never close. James regarded Geoffrey's fishing as showing off, and Geoffrey regarded James's job as surrender. Beverley, the youngest, was the one who kept the peace between them, and the one they both went to when there was trouble at home.

By 1971 Geoffrey had saved enough, with a loan from the bank and a smaller one from Van Der Berg, to buy his own boat: a thirty-five-foot timber trawler with a Gardner diesel, which he renamed the Steady Return. He fished for shark and scallops in Bass Strait and for whatever else would pay when those did not.

The Show

In March 1970 Beverley dragged him to the Burnie Show. She knew a young teacher from Burnie Primary School who was running the school's stand, and introduced them. Evelyn Joyce Carrington was twenty-two, from Launceston, educated and quietly confident, and she had taught James's son, Peter, the year before. Geoffrey thought her too clever for her own good and said so, more or less, within five minutes. She thought him rude and said so as well.

He found reasons to turn up at the school over the following months: to carry tables, to fix a gate, to watch his nephew in a play. She found she was waiting for him. He was not easy company. He talked little and read nothing, but he knew every bird on the coast by its call and could describe the strait at dawn in a way she had not expected. He proposed in September 1971 with his grandmother's ring, resized by a jeweller in Wilson Street, and they married at St George's Anglican Church on 27 December 1971. The Carringtons came from Launceston in their good clothes and looked at the Marstons as though they were from another country. Evelyn spent the reception making each side feel welcome to the other.

They rented and then, in 1972, bought a weatherboard house on Marine Terrace, three streets back from the water. Geoffrey lived in it for the rest of his life.

A House That Went Quiet

David Geoffrey Marston was born on 5 May 1973. Margaret Anne Marston followed in 1975 and Catherine Louise Marston in 1978. Geoffrey was at sea for the births of both his daughters.

He loved his children and did not know how to show it in any form they could recognise. At sea he was competent, patient and calm. At home he was none of those things. He was away for days or weeks at a time, and when he came back the house organised itself around him: quiet mornings, fixed meals, homework laid out for inspection. He judged his son by standards he had never been given himself and did not explain. David's successes raised the bar. His failures were met with silence.

The daughters had an easier time of it, mainly because less was expected of them. Margaret kept out of his way. Catherine filled the house with injured birds and stray cats, which he tolerated for Evelyn's sake and occasionally, when nobody was watching, fed.

He took David out on the Steady Return for the first time in the summer of 1982. The boy was seasick within the hour and stayed sick all day. Geoffrey took him again the next summer, and the summer after that, and then stopped. He never told David that he had been sick himself for his first two seasons with Van Der Berg.

Van Der Berg had died in 1979, at seventy-six, in his bed in a boarding house on Wilson Street, two years after selling Marianne's Dream. Geoffrey was one of his pallbearers. The old man had no family in Australia, and Geoffrey paid for the headstone. He did not tell Evelyn how much it had cost, and when she found the receipt she did not ask.

Rocky Cape

The scallop beds of eastern Bass Strait, which had carried the Steady Return through the 1970s, were fished out in the early 1980s. The fishery was closed and reopened and closed again, and quotas were cut. Geoffrey's income halved in three years. He kept the boat by fishing harder for shark, working longer trips in worse weather, and borrowing against the house without telling Evelyn until the bank wrote to her.

The letter arrived in October 1984. Evelyn read it at the kitchen table and put it on his plate for when he came in. It was the closest their marriage came to breaking. She did not shout, and he did not apologise. She went to the bank herself the following week, restructured the loan against her own salary, and from then on she kept the household accounts. He let her. Neither of them ever referred to it again, but after 1984 the house on Marine Terrace was, in the matters that counted, hers.

On 14 June 1986 he was trawling off Rocky Cape, west of Burnie, in a rising north-westerly with a crew of two. His deckhand was Wayne Coates, nineteen years old, the son of a mill fitter in Upper Burnie, who had been with him for eight months. Late in the afternoon a sea came over the stern while Coates was clearing the net. He went overboard. Geoffrey turned the boat and searched for two hours in failing light before the weather forced him back. Coates's body was recovered by a police boat four days later near Sisters Beach.

The coroner found that the death was accidental and that the skipper was not at fault. Coates had not been wearing a lifejacket, which was not then the law, and Geoffrey had not required one, which was not then the practice. From the next trip onwards he did. He never discussed the accident with his wife or his children, and when David asked about it years later as a young policeman, he left the room. He did not drink, having watched his father, except on 14 June each year, when he drank alone in the shed behind the house until he slept.

After 1986 he was harder at home. He had always been strict. Now he was strict about everything, and frightened in a way his children could see but not name. The rules about the sea, the weather and the boat spread to homework, curfews and shoes at the door. Evelyn, who knew what was underneath it, protected the children where she could and let the rest go.

Teaching Is Women's Work

In the winter of 1990, at dinner, seventeen-year-old David announced that he was thinking of becoming a teacher. Geoffrey put down his knife and said that teaching was women's work, in front of his wife, who taught, and his two daughters. Nobody said anything. David did not raise it again.

Geoffrey regretted the remark within the hour, and never said so. When David applied to Tasmania Police in 1991 and entered the Academy at Rokeby in February 1992, Geoffrey approved more openly than he had of anything his son had done. Police work was hard, disciplined and dangerous. It was work a Marston could do. He drove Evelyn down to Rokeby for the graduation parade in November 1993, shook his son's hand and told him to keep his head down.

His relationship with his daughters was simpler and thinner. He was proud of Margaret's place at art school in Hobart and did not understand anything she made there. He was closer to Catherine, who trained as a veterinary nurse and worked in Devonport, and who was the only one of his children who argued with him to his face. He respected her for it, though he did not tell her that either.

Diminishing Returns

Through the 1990s Burnie shrank. The pulp mill closed in 1998 and the town's population fell as the jobs went. Geoffrey's brother James died of a heart attack in 2001 at fifty-eight. Geoffrey went to the funeral and did not speak. Beverley, who had married a mill worker and raised four children in Somerset, gave the eulogy and afterwards told Geoffrey that he and James had wasted fifty years being angry at each other for having the same father.

The Steady Return kept working. Geoffrey cut his trips shorter as he aged, took on younger crew, and made a living that was smaller each year. In 2007, when David was investigated over his handling of an armed siege at Bridgewater, Geoffrey rang him from Burnie and said that the boy had done what was necessary. It was the closest he came to praising his son, and they both knew it.

Evelyn retired from Burnie Primary School in 2001 after thirty-three years. With her home all day, the house changed, and so, slowly, did Geoffrey. He began to talk to her in the evenings about the sea, about Van Der Berg, and once, in 2004, about Wayne Coates.

Grandfather

David's daughter, Grace Evelyn Marston, was born in Hobart on 14 March 2002, and his son, Samuel Geoffrey Marston, on 22 November 2005. Geoffrey was a different man with them. He held Grace on his knee at Marine Terrace and named the birds outside the window for her. He let Samuel help him mend nets in the shed and answered every question the boy asked about fish, currents, tides and the strait, at a length none of his own children had ever heard from him.

Samuel's interest in the sea delighted him. Here was a Marston who loved the water for its own sake, not as a way to make a living. Geoffrey took him out on the Steady Return in the summer of 2012, in flat calm, and Samuel was not sick. It was one of the happiest days of Geoffrey's later life, and David, who heard about it afterwards, was not sure what he felt.

Alice, David's wife, had puzzled Geoffrey from the beginning. She was quiet, bookish and from a Hobart family of accountants, and he did not know what to say to her until she asked him about fishing and listened to the answer for an hour. After that he was courteous to her and occasionally kind.

Ashore

Arthritis took his hands first. By 2011 he could no longer grip a line through a winter trip, and in 2013 he sold the Steady Return to a younger skipper from Stanley who renamed her. Geoffrey did not go down to the wharf to watch her leave.

He did not adapt well to being ashore. He tried to fix things around the house and grew angry when his hands would not do what he asked. He watched the weather forecast twice a day for a boat he no longer owned. Evelyn gave him the vegetable garden and, gradually, the grandchildren's visits as reasons to get up, and he took both. He mellowed in his seventies, but only partly. Catherine visited every fortnight from Devonport. David came less often. When he did, father and son talked about the weather, the football and the news, and occasionally, briefly, about something else.

On 21 July 2023 he fell in the garden at Marine Terrace while trying to move a wheelbarrow of compost Evelyn had told him to leave. He broke his hip. The operation at the hospital in Burnie went well, but he developed pneumonia in the second week and did not recover from it. Alice handled the specialists and the medications by telephone from Hobart. David and Alice drove north for the last two days, and David sat by the bed and talked with his father about the boat, about Van Der Berg and about the day off Rocky Cape, which Geoffrey had never discussed with him before.

Geoffrey Walter Marston died in the early hours of 4 August 2023, aged seventy-eight, with Evelyn, David, Margaret and Catherine in the room. His funeral was held at St George's Anglican Church in Burnie, where he had been married fifty-one years earlier. Beverley had died in 2019, and his old crew were mostly gone. The church was half full of fishermen's widows, former pupils of Evelyn's and people from Marine Terrace. David gave the eulogy. It was short and accurate. Margaret said afterwards that it was the first true thing she had ever heard him say about their father. Geoffrey was buried in the Wivenhoe cemetery, a few hundred metres from the cottage where he had been born.