Two Coffees on Augusta Road

Grace Evelyn Marston was born at 11:52 pm at Calvary Hospital on Augusta Road in Lenah Valley, the first child of Alice Catherine Marston and Detective Sergeant David Geoffrey Marston of Tasmania Police. She was delivered by ventouse at the end of an eighteen-hour labour and weighed 3.12 kilograms.

Alice's contractions began at dawn at the weatherboard house a short drive up the hill from the hospital. They were irregular through the morning, and on the midwives' advice she stayed at home until the early afternoon, when David drove her down. He had taken leave for the day. He had held the rank of detective sergeant for only a few weeks.

The midwife on the evening shift, Helen Varga, found the husband harder to manage than the patient. David asked for progress at regular intervals, wanted each measurement and what it meant, and wrote some of the answers in a notebook. Late in the evening, ten hours into active labour and exhausted, Alice told him to go and find a coffee. He went. The hospital kiosk had closed hours earlier, so he drove to the service station further down Augusta Road.

While he was gone, the second stage of labour stalled. The baby's heart rate dropped with each contraction, and Varga called the obstetrician on duty, Dr Simon Treloar. He examined Alice, recommended an assisted delivery and applied the ventouse. Grace was born three contractions later, limp and silent for the first few seconds, then breathing and crying hard. She was taken briefly to the resuscitation trolley, checked, and returned to her mother's chest within a few minutes.

David came back a quarter of an hour after the birth, carrying two cardboard cups of coffee. He found his wife pale and shaking, his daughter already wrapped, and the obstetrician writing up notes at the bench. He put the cups on the windowsill, where they went cold untouched, and asked Treloar a series of precise questions about what had happened. Then he sat down beside the bed and said nothing for some time.

The baby was named in the birth suite before her father went home. Grace came from Alice's mother, Margaret Grace Hughes, and Evelyn from David's mother, Evelyn Joyce Marston in Burnie. It was the first decision the two of them made as parents, and they made it without disagreement.