Samuel Geoffrey Marston

The Second Child

Samuel Geoffrey Marston was born at 9:48 am on 22 November 2005 at the Royal Hobart Hospital, the second child of David Geoffrey Marston, then a detective sergeant with Tasmania Police, and Alice Catherine Marston née Hughes, a librarian at the Hobart City Library. His sister, Grace Evelyn Marston, was three and a half. The birth was quick and uncomplicated, and Alice said afterwards that it was the only thing Samuel ever did in a hurry.

His names were a small argument between his parents. Alice had chosen Samuel because she liked it and because it belonged to no one in either family. David wanted Geoffrey as the middle name, after his father. Alice hesitated. She knew what David's childhood had been and did not want their son to carry the name of the man who had made it. David insisted, quietly and without explaining why, and she gave way. Years later she decided he had been trying to give his father something he could not give him directly.

The family lived in a weatherboard house in Lenah Valley with a long garden that ran up towards the bush on the lower slopes of kunanyi. Samuel was a placid, watchful baby who slept well and cried little. He was slow to talk and quick to stare. He would lie on a rug in the garden for long stretches watching leaves move, and he could be absorbed for half an hour by water running down a drain. David, who had kept a notebook of Grace's milestones, worried that Samuel was late with his. Alice told him to stop counting.

Shells

Samuel went to Lenah Valley Primary School from 2011. His teachers found him bright, quiet and reluctant to show what he knew. He would solve a problem and then cover his work with his arm. He read early and widely, mostly about animals, and by the age of eight he could name every whale species in the Southern Ocean and had opinions about which were underrated.

The summers in Burnie shaped him more than school did. Every January Alice took the children north to Marine Terrace for a week with their grandparents. Evelyn Marston walked Samuel along the beach below the town and taught him the names of shells, and he kept the ones he found in labelled egg cartons that lined his bedroom shelves at home. Geoffrey Marston, who had been harsh with his own son and distant with Grace, was different with Samuel. He let the boy help mend nets in the shed and answered every question about fish, tides and weather at a length his own children had never heard from him.

In the summer of 2012, when Samuel was six, Geoffrey took him out on the Steady Return on a morning of flat calm. Samuel was not seasick. He spent four hours leaning over the side watching the water and asking what lived under it. Geoffrey told him, slowly and in detail, and at the end of the day said it was the best trip he had made in years. When Samuel told his father about it that evening on the telephone, there was a long pause on the line before David said he was glad.

His aunts filled in the rest. Catherine, his father's younger sister, was a veterinary nurse in Devonport and let Samuel spend afternoons at her clinic during the Burnie visits, holding the heads of anxious dogs and asking the vets questions they were happy to answer. Margaret, the elder sister, was a printmaker in North Hobart who saw her brother rarely and her nephew more often. In 2014 she made a series of linocuts from the shells in Samuel's egg cartons and gave him the first print of each. They hung in his bedroom in Lenah Valley for the rest of his childhood, and he was the only member of the family who visited her studio without being asked.

Explaining Samuel

The household in Lenah Valley ran to David's timetable. Breakfast was at seven. Homework was done at the kitchen table and checked every night. Grace, who resembled their father, met his standards and cried when she could not. Samuel did not resemble anyone. He did his homework in his own order, finished it late, and was often right in ways that were hard to mark. David found him puzzling, sometimes infuriating, and said so. Alice spent much of Samuel's childhood translating him to his father.

Samuel learned early that the easiest way through his father's displeasure was to disappear inside it. He did not argue. He agreed, went to his room and did what he had been going to do anyway. It worked at home and became a habit. Teachers found him compliant and impossible to read. Friends found him pleasant and hard to know. He had one close friend at primary school, a boy named Oliver Kemp who also collected things, and when Oliver's family moved to Launceston in 2015 Samuel did not make another for several years.

Grace looked out for him. She was three years older, sharper and louder, and she treated her brother as hers to defend. She told David when he was being unfair to Samuel, which Samuel himself never did, and she told Samuel, on more than one occasion, that he could not spend his whole life agreeing with people and then ignoring them. He agreed with her and ignored it.

New Town

He went to New Town High School from 2018 and was not happy there. It was a boys' school with a strong sporting culture, and Samuel had no interest in sport and no talent for pretending otherwise. He was not bullied so much as overlooked. He ate lunch in the library most days and spent his free periods in the science laboratories, where a biology teacher named Fiona Raspin let him help set up practicals and lent him her university textbooks.

His anxiety became visible in those years. He dreaded assemblies, oral presentations and anything that required him to be looked at. In Year 9 he walked out of a class debate halfway through his own argument and was found an hour later sitting on the rocks at Cornelian Bay. The school counsellor, Janine Morrell, saw him weekly for the rest of the year. It helped, though not as much as the pandemic did.

When schools in Tasmania moved online in March 2020, Samuel thrived. Without the corridors and the noise, his work improved sharply. He joined online citizen-science projects, logged sea-star sightings along the Derwent for a university survey, and watched recorded lectures from marine biology courses he was years too young to take. When the school reopened in June he found it harder than before.

His Year 10 science project in 2021, on the spread of the introduced northern Pacific sea star through the Derwent estuary, won a state award. It was the first time David came to see something Samuel had made. He read every panel, asked three precise questions, and told his son on the drive home that the methodology was sound. Samuel kept that sentence for a long time.

The same year was hard at home. His father was passed over for promotion and spent months short-tempered and absent, walking alone on the tracks above Fern Tree at weekends. Samuel did what he had always done and kept out of the way. Grace, home from university, did not, and the arguments that winter were the loudest the house had known. Samuel listened to them through his bedroom wall. When his mother finally confronted his father in January 2022 and the house grew quieter, he understood for the first time that the way his family managed things was not the only way, and that his own way of managing them came from somewhere.

The Recordings

He went to Hobart College for Years 11 and 12, from 2022 to 2023, and was happier there. The college was larger, looser and full of students who had come from somewhere else, and nobody cared what he did at lunch. In January 2023, between the two years, he was selected for a three-week summer research placement at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies on the Hobart waterfront. He was attached to a team studying the collapse of the giant kelp forests along Tasmania's east coast, learned to dive, and spent most of the placement in a wetsuit in cold water, counting sea urchins. He came home certain of what he wanted to do.

That same summer he spent ten days at Marine Terrace with a borrowed recorder, interviewing his grandfather. Geoffrey talked for hours about the strait as he had known it: the scallop beds before they collapsed, the shark grounds, the seasons when particular fish came and went, the changes he had seen over fifty years and never been asked about. Samuel used the recordings, along with interviews with three other retired fishermen from Burnie and Stanley, as the basis for his Year 12 research project on local ecological knowledge among north-west coast fishers.

Geoffrey did not talk about Rocky Cape, where his deckhand had drowned in 1986, and Samuel did not know to ask. The recordings were the longest conversations the two of them ever had.

Geoffrey fell in his garden in July 2023 and died of pneumonia on 4 August, in the middle of Samuel's final year. Samuel was in Hobart when it happened, sitting a practice exam, and drove up with Grace for the funeral. At the wake in the church hall at St George's, he played two minutes of one of the recordings through a borrowed speaker: his grandfather naming the seabirds over Bass Strait in winter, one after another. Evelyn asked him for a copy that night. Samuel finished Year 12 that November with results good enough for any marine science course in the country.

Staying

Everyone expected him to leave. He had offers from James Cook University in Townsville and the University of Western Australia, both with strong marine programmes and warm water. Grace, by then in the master's year of her architecture degree, told him to go somewhere he could be someone other than the Marston boy. David told him the best course in the country was at the end of his street.

He stayed. He told his family it was because the course at the University of Tasmania, taught at the Institute where he had spent the summer, was the one he wanted. That was true. It was also true that he was frightened of a city where he knew no one, and that he could not face leaving his grandmother alone in her first year as a widow. David was openly relieved. Grace thought he was hiding, and said so, and then helped him find a share house.

He began a Bachelor of Marine and Antarctic Science in February 2024 and moved into a share house in North Hobart with two other students. He went home to Lenah Valley for dinner on Sundays and drove to Burnie to see Evelyn once a month, usually with his father.

Those drives north became the longest stretches of time he had ever spent alone with David. They were three and a half hours each way, and for the first few months they were mostly silent. Then, somewhere between Campbell Town and Deloraine, his father began to ask about the course, and Samuel began to answer properly. David asked the questions he would have asked a witness: what was measured, how, by whom, and what would change the result. Samuel found that he liked being asked them. By the end of 2024 they argued on the Midland Highway about sampling design with an ease neither of them had managed about anything else.

Cold Water

His first two years at university were good and uneven. He was excellent in the field and in the laboratory, and poor at anything that involved presenting his work to a room. He failed his first attempt at a second-year statistics unit in 2025, not because he could not do the work but because he did not hand in the final assignment, having decided the night before it was due that it was not good enough. He passed it the following semester. It was the first time he had failed anything, and he told no one in his family until it was over.

In September 2024 he took his father out on a hired boat on the lower Derwent to show him the sites he was surveying for a class project. The water was choppy. David was sick over the side within forty minutes, as he had been on his own father's boat forty years earlier, and Samuel laughed until David laughed too. Neither of them had seen the other laugh like that before.

He had his first serious relationship, beginning late in his first year, with Isla Brandt, a geology student from Devonport who dived with the university club. It lasted eleven months. She ended it in the winter of 2025, telling him that she never knew what he was thinking, and he did not argue. He spent a fortnight in the field on Maria Island afterwards and came back with a dataset and no explanation. Alice, who recognised the pattern, did not push.

The Southern Ocean

In January 2026 Samuel was selected as one of four undergraduate volunteers on a five-week research voyage to the Southern Ocean, sampling plankton along the edge of the sea ice. He was not seasick once. He worked twelve-hour shifts in the wet laboratory, saw his first emperor penguins off the ice edge, and wrote long emails home that his grandmother printed out and kept in a folder.

He began his third year in February 2026. He planned to stay on for honours on the east coast kelp forests that had drawn him in at seventeen, under the same group that had first taught him to dive, and he had begun, cautiously, to talk in seminars. He still lived in the share house in North Hobart and still went to Lenah Valley on Sundays, where he and his father had developed the habit of talking about water temperatures and urchin densities at a length that made Alice leave the room.

In November 2026 he turned twenty-one. Grace flew down from Melbourne for the weekend. Evelyn sent a card from Burnie with a scallop shell taped inside it and a note in her careful teacher's hand, telling him it had come from the beach below Marine Terrace and that his grandfather would have known what it was.