Grace Evelyn Marston

First Child

Grace Evelyn Marston was born at 11:52 pm on 14 March 2002 at Calvary Hospital in Hobart, after an eighteen-hour labour, the first child of David Geoffrey Marston, then a newly promoted detective sergeant with Tasmania Police, and Alice Catherine Marston née Hughes, a librarian at the Hobart City Library. Her father spent much of the labour asking the midwives for updates. Her mother eventually sent him out for coffee, and Grace was born while he was gone.

Her first name came from Alice's mother, Margaret Grace Hughes, and her second from David's mother, Evelyn Joyce Marston, who wept when she heard. It pleased Evelyn more than anyone had expected that Grace had also been her own mother's name. The baby came home to a weatherboard house in Lenah Valley, at the foot of kunanyi, which her parents had bought two years earlier and which her mother had spent those two years making less like a barracks.

She was an alert, demanding baby who slept badly and watched everything. David kept a notebook of her milestones in the same hand he used for his case notes. When Alice went back to the library three days a week in February 2003, after the worst argument of her marriage, Grace went to family day care in New Town, where the carers found her bright, stubborn and unwilling to share.

Her brother, Samuel Geoffrey Marston, was born on 22 November 2005, when Grace was three and a half. She regarded him at first as an intrusion and then, within a year, as her property.

The Kitchen Table

Grace went to Lenah Valley Primary School from 2007. She learned quickly and needed to be right. Her teachers found her capable, precise and easily upset by her own mistakes. At home, homework was done at the kitchen table and checked by her father every night. Grace met his standard more often than not, and when she did not, she cried, quietly, and did it again. Of the two children she was the one who resembled him, and both of them knew it before either could have said so.

She was less good with other children. Classmates found her bossy and serious, and she found most of them careless. In Year 6, in 2013, a girl named Brittany Haines told the class that Grace's mother was weird and boring, like all librarians. Grace shoved her into the climbing frame, split her lip and was suspended for two days. David told her that the method had been wrong. Alice noticed that he did not say the reason had been.

The summers in Burnie were the part of childhood she remembered most fondly. Every January Alice took the children north to Marine Terrace. Evelyn gave Grace paper and pencils and taught her to draw floor plans of imaginary houses, room by room, with the doors in the right places. For her eighth birthday Evelyn gave her a book of the world's great buildings, and Grace read it until the spine broke. Her grandfather, Geoffrey, who was gentler with his grandchildren than he had been with his own, told her about the way salt air ate steel and timber on the coast, and which buildings in Burnie had stood up to it. She remembered that for longer than she remembered most of what she learned at school.

Ogilvie

She went to Ogilvie High School, the state girls' school in New Town, from 2014. It suited her. The girls were competitive in the way she was, and the teachers rewarded the kind of work she did. She was strong in mathematics and art, which her father regarded as an odd combination and her mother regarded as obvious. By Year 9 she knew she wanted to be an architect.

Her art teacher at Ogilvie, Ruth Calloway, was the first adult to tell her that precision was not the same thing as good design. Calloway set her a project in Year 10 to draw the same room three times, once as it was, once as it would feel to a frightened child, and once as it would feel to an old woman who could not see well. Grace found the second and third drawings almost impossible and resented the exercise for a month. She kept the drawings for the rest of her life. Her closest friend at school was Hana Okafor, who wanted to be a surgeon and was as competitive as Grace was. They studied together in the State Library on Saturdays, argued about everything, and stayed friends after Hana went to Melbourne for medicine.

David did not object to architecture, exactly. He approved of the mathematics and the professional standing. He worried about the money and the uncertainty, and for two years he suggested engineering at intervals, with the same patience he applied to interviewing reluctant witnesses. Grace said no each time. It was the first decision of any size she made against him, and she was surprised by how calm she was while she made it.

Samuel, by then at New Town High across the road, was having a harder time than she was. Grace looked out for him. She told their father when he was being unfair to Samuel, which Samuel himself never did. She also told Samuel, frequently, that he could not spend his life agreeing with people and then ignoring them. He agreed, and ignored her.

She went to Hobart College for Years 11 and 12 in 2018 and 2019. Her final-year design project, a community centre for a vacant block in Glenorchy, won a state student design award, and she was offered a place in architecture at the University of Tasmania.

Inside

She began her degree in February 2020. Six weeks later the university closed its campus for the pandemic, and Grace spent most of her first year working at a desk in her childhood bedroom in Lenah Valley. She did well. She was disciplined, she did not need company, and her drawings were cleaner than anyone else's. She also spent the year almost entirely with her family, which at the time she did not mind.

That year also brought her closer to Samuel than they had been since he was small. He was fourteen, anxious and happier at home than he had ever been at school, and the two of them spent the lockdown evenings in the garden after their parents had gone to bed. She taught him to drive in 2022 in the car park at the Lenah Valley shops, after their father's lessons had ended twice in silence. He was a careful, slow driver. She told him so every time, and he told her she drove like their father, which was true and which she did not like.

The return to campus in 2021 was harder. Studio work meant group projects, and Grace was bad at them. She took over, redid other people's work at night, and resented them for letting her. A studio tutor wrote in her second-year report that her individual work was excellent and that she needed to learn that architecture was made by groups.

The winter of 2021 was hard at home as well. Her father had been passed over for promotion and was taking it out on everyone in the house, and her mother was doing what she always did, which was smoothing it over and waiting. Grace argued with her father that winter more loudly than she ever had. In December, at the end of her second year, she sat her mother down and told her that she had spent twenty years making excuses for him and might try telling him to stop. Alice did not speak to her properly for a week. Then, in January, she did as Grace had said. Grace never told her father that the conversation had started with her.

The Refuge

In her third year, in 2022, Grace's studio was asked to design transitional housing for women and children leaving family violence. Her first scheme was secure, efficient and well drawn. The studio invited three women who had lived in such housing to review the designs. One of them looked at Grace's plan for a long time and told her that it was a very nice prison. Grace went home and sat at the kitchen table until two in the morning, unable to work. Alice found her there.

She redrew the scheme over the following month after going back to the three women and asking them what they had needed. The second version had gardens, kitchens people could cook in together, windows that looked out rather than down on the entrance, and doors that residents could lock from the inside. It won the studio prize. More importantly, it changed how she worked. She stopped designing for people and started asking them first.

She finished her undergraduate degree at the end of 2022. She had also spent most of that year in a relationship with James Liu, a fellow architecture student from Launceston. It ended in early 2023 when he told her that she ran their relationship like a project, with milestones. She knew he was right and was angry with him for weeks for saying so.

Interview Rooms

She began her master's degree in architecture in 2023. For her design thesis she chose the spaces in which police dealt with victims of violence: interview rooms, waiting areas, family violence units. She wanted to know why buildings meant to help people so often made them feel accused.

Her father was the obvious source, and the most difficult one. When she asked him for access, he was suspicious, then interested, and then more helpful than she had expected. He arranged for her to tour two stations and spoke to the officers who ran the family violence unit in Hobart. He also answered her questions about how police actually used rooms, which doors they watched and where they sat, with a precision that made her thesis better and made her uncomfortable. She had not realised how much of her own way of looking at a room she had learned from him.

Her grandfather died in August 2023, in the middle of her first year of the master's. She drove to Burnie with Samuel for the funeral and watched her father give a short, accurate eulogy that made her aunt Margaret cry. At the wake Samuel played a recording of their grandfather naming seabirds, and Grace went outside and stood in the car park for a long time.

The collaboration had limits. In the middle of 2024 he asked to read her draft, and she let him. He came back the next week with eleven pages of notes, most of them useful, and one objection. A chapter on how police culture shaped the rooms it used was, he said, unfair to the officers who worked in them. Grace said that it was accurate. They argued about it across the kitchen table for an evening, and neither gave ground. She kept the chapter. He did not mention it again, and at the presentation he did not ask about it, which she understood as the closest he could come to conceding.

She completed her master's degree at the end of 2024 with a thesis proposing a redesigned victim interview suite: separate entrances, natural light, no clock on the wall, chairs that did not face the door. Her father came to the final presentation in a suit, sat in the back row, and asked the panel's best question. Grace was annoyed about it for days and kept the notes he had written on the programme.

Melbourne

In December 2024 she took a graduate position with a large architecture practice in Melbourne and moved into a shared flat in Brunswick. It was the first time she had lived anywhere but Lenah Valley. She had told Samuel a year earlier that he should leave Hobart and become someone other than the Marston boy. He had stayed. She went, partly to prove the point.

The first year was hard. The practice worked long hours on large commercial projects, and Grace was a junior on a team designing car parks and lobbies for an office tower. She was good at it and hated it. She worked twelve-hour days, ate badly and did not make friends. In August 2025 she had a panic attack on a tram on Sydney Road and had to get off two stops early and sit on the kerb. She told no one in her family. She told a doctor, which was progress.

She telephoned her father every Sunday evening and argued with him about planning law, building codes and the state of Hobart's waterfront. The arguments were real and also, she came to understand, the only way the two of them knew how to say that they missed each other. She telephoned her mother on Wednesdays and told her the truth about how things were. She did not tell her father until much later.

Her grandmother wrote to her as well. Evelyn, widowed and in her late seventies, sent letters to Brunswick once a month in the same careful hand she had used on blackboards for thirty-three years, with news of the garden, of the reading group she had taken over at the Burnie library, and of the neighbours on Marine Terrace. She did not ask Grace how she was. She asked what she was building. Grace wrote back on paper, which she had not done for anyone since primary school, and found that the letters were the only place in her week where she described her work as though it mattered to her.

Hana, by then in her final year of medicine at a hospital in Melbourne's north, was the one who noticed in mid-2025 that something was wrong. They met for dinner on a Friday, and Grace fell asleep at the table. Hana told her that she was working like someone trying to prove something to someone who was not in the room. Grace knew exactly who she meant.

Fitzroy

In March 2026 she left the large practice for a small studio in Fitzroy that designed community housing, refuges and public buildings for local councils. The pay was lower and the work was the work she had wanted since the refuge project in 2022. Within six months she was leading the design of a family violence support centre for a council in Melbourne's outer west, and spending her days asking the women who would use it what they needed.

She still found group work difficult. She still redid other people's drawings at night, though less often. She had started seeing a landscape architect named Tom Ackland, who worked in the same building and who laughed at her milestones rather than resenting them.

In November 2026 she flew down to Hobart for Samuel's twenty-first birthday. She stayed in her old bedroom in Lenah Valley, argued with her father about planning law at the kitchen table where she had once done her homework, and drove to Burnie on the Sunday to see her grandmother. Evelyn had kept every floor plan Grace had drawn at Marine Terrace since she was six. She gave them to her in a folder, in order.