“You’ve got to get them young,” Linley Grant said as she spread out the paraphernalia of birdwatching on a desk at Campbell Street Primary School.
There were feathers and old nests, binoculars, identification charts and brightly coloured maps showing bird migration routes. There were cards to be handed out displaying Tasmania’s 12 bird species found nowhere else on earth and to top it all, a stuffed masked owl and wedge-tailed eagle, the latter towering over the children crowded around Linley and her collection of exhibits.
The children were rapt, fascinated. The world of birds had been spread out before them and Linley was proving her point.
I had been recruited on several of these occasions, as I remember it, to New Town Primary school on one outing when Linley had taken the children out into the playground to show them a white goshawk in a gum tree.
Although I received star billing as the “On the wing” Mercury columnist, it was always Linley’s show. She had a magical gift for connection with young children and, most importantly, opening their eyes to the wonders of nature.
Linley Grant, who was awarded an OAM in 1993 for community service, asked me to be involved in the “school run” after I had told her how my fascination with birds had developed while I was at primary school in my homeland of Britain.
One spring day in the 1950s, a flock of blue tits had flown through an open window of the classroom and had become trapped. The five or six birds were fluttering in a panic, before our teacher urged the excited children to sit and be quiet. This allowed the birds to settle on the window sill, and allowed myself and the other children to study the tiny birds and their colourful plumage blues and lemon yellows. Gently, the teacher then ushered the birds to freedom. I don’t know about my classmates, but that close encounter fired my interest in all things feathered. The memory of those birds has lived with me forever.
On my school trips with Linley I also took along pictures of European bluetits and other British birds to complement the Australian ones.
The subject of natural history was a core part of the primary school curriculum in my day and when I came Australia I was surprised to discover that was not the case here.
That might explain why so many British-born citizens of Australia have a love of birds, and this is reflected in the large number of “Poms” in bird organisations.
Linley also saw the value in educating children about birds. As she put it so succinctly, starting them young.
Sadly, Linley died earlier this year, aged 89, but her memory lives on with all those children who attended her workshops, and now find a connection with our birds.