Theodore James Rankin

Slack Water

Theodore James Rankin was born at 4:23 pm on 12 March 1981 at Calvary Hospital in Lenah Valley, during an autumn storm that had driven Hobart's fishing fleet into port. He was the first child of William Theodore Rankin, a commercial fisherman, and Margaret Anne Rankin née Fraser, who taught marine science at Hobart College. His father had tied up his trawler, the Southern Current, at Constitution Dock that morning and spent the labour with a marine radio on the windowsill. He noted afterwards, from the tide table in his jacket pocket, that his son had arrived near slack water.

William was born in Hobart in 1952 and had fished out of Constitution Dock since he left school, first as a deckhand and from 1978 on his own boat. He worked crayfish and shark in season and trawled for flathead and gummy shark the rest of the year. Margaret was born in Launceston in 1954, the daughter of a schoolteacher, James Fraser, after whom her son was named. She had studied zoology at the University of Tasmania and gone into teaching because it was the only science job she could find in Hobart in the late 1970s. She was good at it, and she did not entirely forgive the profession for being her second choice.

The family lived in a weatherboard cottage in Taroona, on the western shore of the Derwent south of Sandy Bay, a few minutes' walk from the rock platforms below the cliffs. Two more children followed. Claire Margaret Rankin was born in 1983 and Lachlan William Rankin in 1986. The house was small, loud and always slightly damp, with wetsuits drying on the back verandah and a fish tank in the living room that Margaret restocked every term with whatever her students had collected.

The Rock Platforms

Theodore grew up on the shore. Margaret took the children down to the rock pools at low tide from the time they could walk, and she taught them to turn stones over carefully and put them back the way they had found them. Theodore was the one who stayed longest. By the age of seven he could name most of the common intertidal animals on the Taroona platforms, and he kept a notebook of what he found on each visit, in columns, with the tide height written at the top of every page.

His father's work was harder to share. William left the house before dawn and was sometimes gone for a week. When he came home he was tired, short-tempered and smelled of diesel, and the house organised itself around his sleep. He took Theodore out on the Southern Current for the first time in 1989, when the boy was eight, and found that his son was more interested in what came up in the net than in how it got there. Theodore asked the names of the bycatch, wanted to keep the ones that were thrown back, and cried when a seal took a fish off the line. William, who had hoped for a deckhand, recognised early that he had a naturalist instead.

Theodore went to Taroona Primary School from 1987 to 1993. In Year 6 he spent a term watching pot-bellied seahorses at the Tinderbox Marine Reserve with his mother, and his project on their life cycle won a state primary science award. He was a quiet, serious child who was easy to teach and hard to draw out, and who preferred one friend to several. His teachers' reports said much the same thing every year: excellent in science, careful in everything, reluctant to speak in front of the class.

Claire Margaret, two years younger, was the sociable one. Lachlan William, five years younger, was the one who took after their father. He was on the boat whenever William would take him, and he could gut a flathead before he could ride a bicycle. The three siblings were close in the way of children who shared a small house, and competitive in the way of children whose parents had obvious favourites without meaning to.

Taroona High

He went to Taroona High School from 1994 to 1999. He was strong in biology, chemistry and mathematics, played in the school's second football team without distinction, and learned to dive at fourteen through a school dive club that his mother helped to run. Diving changed the scale of what he could study. The kelp forests off the Taroona shore, which he had seen only as dark patches from the cliffs, became a place he could enter. He spent most of his weekends in the water through his last three years of school, often alone, which his mother disliked and his father, who had lost two friends at sea, forbade outright and then stopped mentioning.

The Taroona shoreline was changing as he watched it. The giant kelp that had once formed dense stands along the Derwent and the east coast was already in decline by the early 1990s, and Theodore's notebooks from those years recorded patches that were there one summer and gone the next. He did not yet know why. He knew that his father's catches were falling as well, and that the two things were discussed at the dinner table in different tones of voice: his mother's with curiosity, his father's with something closer to dread.

The household was not always peaceful. The fishing industry in Tasmania went through a long contraction in the 1990s, with new quotas, falling prices and rising costs. William borrowed against the boat twice. In 1997 he and Margaret came close to separating over money, and for most of a winter he slept on the boat. They reconciled in the spring, and none of the three children ever learned exactly what had been said. Theodore, sixteen at the time, dealt with it by spending even more time underwater.

Urchins

He enrolled in a Bachelor of Science at the University of Tasmania in 2000, majoring in marine biology, and lived at home in Taroona to save money. He was an outstanding undergraduate and a poor tutorial participant, and he spent his summers volunteering as a field assistant on any diving project that would take him. His honours year, in 2003, examined the effect of sea urchin grazing on the structure of kelp forest communities on the east coast. The fieldwork involved weeks of cold, repetitive counting in poor visibility, and he loved it. The thesis was awarded first-class honours.

He went straight into a doctorate in marine ecology, from 2004 to 2008, on how warming water was changing the temperate reef communities of eastern Tasmania. The east coast was warming faster than almost any ocean region in the southern hemisphere, as the East Australian Current pushed further south, and it was carrying species with it. Theodore spent four years diving sites from the Bay of Fires to the Tasman Peninsula, often in conditions that his supervisors would have stopped had they been in the boat. His thesis argued that the reefs were not degrading at random but shifting towards a new state, and that the shift might not be reversible.

The work had costs. In 2006 he lost a diving buddy, a fellow student from Queensland, for eleven terrifying minutes in low visibility off Maria Island. She surfaced safely a hundred metres away, but Theodore did not dive for a month afterwards, and he was a more conservative diver for the rest of his career. He did not tell his parents.

Mutual Friends

Theodore met Sienna Alice Blackwood in 2008 through mutual friends, during her first year as a constable with Tasmania Police and the last months of his doctorate. She was twenty-four and he was twenty-seven. She was quicker in conversation than he was and more certain of what she wanted, and she found his habit of thinking for a long time before answering a question either restful or maddening depending on the day. The relationship developed slowly and without much drama, which suited them both.

He finished his doctorate later in 2008 and joined the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania as a postdoctoral research fellow. His first project mapped the decline of Tasmania's giant kelp forests, which had lost more than ninety-five per cent of their historical cover since the middle of the twentieth century. The figures were worse than he had expected, and the work of documenting them was dispiriting in a way that the fieldwork itself had never been.

Theodore and Sienna married in December 2010 at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens in Hobart, a few months after her transfer to the Criminal Investigation Branch as a detective constable. The guests were an uneasy mix of doctors from her parents' side, scientists from his and police from hers. William Rankin, in a borrowed suit, spent most of the reception talking to Sienna's father, the cardiologist Alexander Blackwood, about the hearts of fish. Lachlan, by then working as a deckhand on his father's boat, made a short best man's speech that his brother was relieved to get through.

Mount Nelson

In 2011 they bought a house in Mount Nelson, on the hill above Sandy Bay, with a view down to the Derwent and a garden that Theodore maintained with greater enthusiasm than skill. Sienna worked long, irregular hours in the CIB. Theodore's work took him to sea for weeks at a time on research voyages in the Southern Ocean, sampling the waters that fed the currents he studied on the coast, and he came home salt-stained and sunburnt with more stories than she had time to hear. They learned early that neither of them would be reliably available, and they planned around it.

He was promoted to research scientist at the Institute in 2012. His funding came, like that of most of his colleagues, from one grant to the next, and he spent as much of his working life writing applications as diving. In 2013 a major application to the Australian Research Council, for a five-year programme on kelp restoration, was rejected after two years of preparation. Two of his postdoctoral staff lost their positions. Theodore took it badly and personally, and Sienna, who had little sympathy for academic politics, told him to rewrite it and send it again. He did. It was funded in 2015.

Their daughter, Skye Alice Rankin, was born on 14 March 2014, named in part after Sienna's mother. Theodore took the first two months off and found that he was better at night feeds than at sleep. He cut back his time at sea the following year, partly by choice and partly because Sienna had been promoted to detective sergeant and the household could not absorb two absent parents.

In 2016 he was promoted to senior research scientist, the same year he published a paper in Nature Climate Change on the tropicalisation of temperate reefs, with collaborators in New Zealand, Chile and South Africa. It became the most cited piece of work he produced. It also made him, for a while, a regular voice in the Tasmanian press on the state of the coast, a role he found uncomfortable and did not do well. He was precise where journalists wanted him to be vivid, and on one occasion, on local radio, he said that he did not expect the east coast's giant kelp to survive his lifetime. He was right to say it and spent a month regretting it.

August

Their son, Henry Theodore Rankin, was born on 4 May 2017. Sienna had been promoted to detective inspector the year before, while she was pregnant, and she went back to work when Henry was four months old. Theodore's schedule was more flexible than hers, and he took on most of the school runs, the medical appointments and the day-to-day logistics of a household with two children under four. He did it competently and without complaint, and occasionally resented it more than he admitted.

The first fortnight of August 2018 was the hardest period of the marriage. Sienna was called to a death in Berriedale on the evening of 2 August and spent most of the following week at headquarters. On 7 August she authorised the surveillance of a fellow detective, Sarah Lahey, who died the next day. Theodore knew little more than that, and it was some months before Sienna told him more. He kept the children away from the house during the worst of it, taking them to his parents in Taroona for several nights, and cancelled a Southern Ocean voyage he had been planning for a year.

The months that followed were difficult. Sienna slept badly and talked little, and the internal reviews into her decisions went on into the following year. Theodore, who processed difficulty by going quiet himself, found that two silent people in one house did not make a peaceful household. They began seeing a counsellor together in early 2019, at his suggestion. It helped. It did not make the year better, but it made it possible for them to talk about it.

Restoration

In 2020 Theodore established the Tasmanian Kelp Forest Restoration Project at the Institute, with field sites from Maria Island in the south-east to the Kent Group in Bass Strait. The project's central idea was to find and breed the strains of giant kelp that could survive warmer water, and to replant them on reefs where urchins had been controlled. The pandemic cut the first field season in half, and a lab outbreak of disease destroyed most of the first year's cultured seedlings. The second year went better. By 2022 the project had restored small test patches of kelp at four sites, and two of them had survived a summer.

In March 2022 he found a stand of giant kelp growing at depth off the Freycinet Peninsula, in cooler water below forty metres, at a site that had been mapped as barren. Confirming it required a technical dive deeper than any he had made before. Sienna did not want him to do it and said so, more than once, and they argued about it for a week. He did the dive with two colleagues, carefully planned and without incident, and the refuge became the most important finding of the project. Sienna never told him she was glad he had gone.

His brother was a harder conversation. Lachlan had left the Southern Current in 2009 and gone to work for one of the large salmon-farming companies in the south of the state, first on the pens in the Huon estuary and later as a site manager on Macquarie Harbour. Theodore's colleagues at the Institute were among the industry's most persistent critics. At Christmas 2019, at their parents' house in Taroona, the brothers argued about fish farming across the table until Claire, home from Melbourne, sent them both outside. They did not speak for most of the following year, and when they did, they avoided the subject.

The Southern Current

William Rankin sold the Southern Current in 2014, after thirty-six years on his own boat. His catches had fallen for a decade, the costs of fuel and quota had risen, and his back would no longer take the work. He did not take well to retirement. He spent his days walking the Taroona foreshore, rebuilding an old dinghy in the shed that he never put in the water, and listening to the fishing fleet on the marine radio that had sat on the windowsill of the labour ward the day his first son was born.

In the summer of 2021 Theodore took his father out on one of the Institute's boats to a restoration site off Maria Island. William had fished those reefs in the 1980s. He looked at the depth sounder for a long time and then named the spots where the kelp had been, the cray pots he had set and the boats he had worked alongside. Theodore took notes. The conversation became a series of interviews with retired fishermen about the reefs they had known, which the project used to locate historical kelp beds that no scientific survey had ever recorded.

In January 2023 the project took four summer research students, among them Samuel Geoffrey Marston, a seventeen-year-old from Lenah Valley whose grandfather had fished Bass Strait for forty years. Samuel learned to dive with the team and spent most of the placement counting urchins in cold water. Theodore, who had been a quiet seventeen-year-old in a wetsuit himself, recognised the type and gave him more responsibility than placement students usually received.

Two months later, in March 2023, Sienna's mother, Alice Jane Blackwood, died in Brisbane after a short illness. Sienna flew north for her last days and for the funeral, and in the months afterwards she flew back often to see her father. Theodore kept the household running in Mount Nelson and took the children to Brisbane for the funeral. He had liked Alice, who had always asked about his work in detail and remembered the answers.

The Cold Water

By 2026 Theodore Rankin was forty-five and the most senior kelp ecologist at the Institute. He still led the restoration project, which had expanded to eleven sites, and he still spent most of each year writing to keep it funded. He went to sea less than he once had. He still dived most weeks in the summer, though more conservatively than in his twenties, and his younger colleagues teased him for checking his equipment three times.

Skye was twelve and in her last year at Sandy Bay Primary, observant, logical and fiercely protective of her younger brother. Henry was nine and built things out of whatever was to hand. Both children spent part of their summers on the rock platforms at Taroona with their grandmother, turning stones over and putting them back the way they had found them. Samuel Marston, by then in the third year of his degree, had asked to do his honours year in the kelp group in 2027, and Theodore had agreed to supervise him.

His parents still lived in the cottage in Taroona. William was seventy-four, slower and quieter than he had been, and still listened to the fleet on the radio in the mornings. Claire telephoned from Melbourne on Sundays. Lachlan and Theodore had reached a truce that consisted of talking about football. At home in Mount Nelson, the garden was no better than it had ever been, and Sienna had long since stopped expecting it to be.