Sitting at the wheel of my car on the forecourt of the Skyline garage in South Hobart I heard a commotion in the air. Forest ravens were going ballistic and when I looked up I could see a white goshawk flying in wide circles in the airspace above the service station, the panorama of the city spread out behind it far below.
It made a wonderful sight, the sun glinting on the shiny, pure-white outstretched feathers, the goshawk in leisurely flight catching an updraft of air warmed by the late-autumn sunshine.
The ravens’ were annoyed and so was a motorist behind me, impatient to reach the petrol bowser. An apologetic wave after he peeped his horn, and I moved my car, to pursue the real reason I had gone to the garage, beyond filling up the tank. That was to see what progress the garage proprietor, Nev Rodman, had made on the 1954 Morris Minor he was restoring.
The green Morris is of special interest to me because the model was the first car I drove when learning to drive. That was in 1964, the year I started in journalism on a weekly newspaper in England and the Morris belonged to the women’s page editor. She helped me master the skill of driving and, as she put it, the dark arts of speeding on stretches of road she knew the police never patrolled, and parking in restricted bays that always escaped the eye of the traffic warden.
The Morris in Nev’s garage has another connection to my memories of that time, the Swinging Sixties as we called them. It was as I cruised the country lanes of Surrey and Hampshire that I resumed a casual schoolboy interest in birdwatching, bought my first binoculars and was drawn into what became a lifelong passion.
Many birds have flown by since then, and many kilometres registered on the clocks of the cars I have owned. But the visits to the Skyline to view progress on the Morris Minor invoked not only happy memories of a misspent youth in which snooker parlours took their place alongside nature reserves rich in birds. There’s a more sinister tone that has less to do with flying the byways of England like Stirling Moss and more to do with a white goshawk, a threatened species, flying above the forecourt of the Skyline garage.
Just before my last Skyline visit I read a United Nations report saying 50 per cent of wildlife had vanished across the world in the past half century, about the same span of time from when I learned to drive.
The worldwide decline is mirrored by another report that says farmland birds in Britain have followed the worldwide trend, falling by just under 50 per cent.
Along those L-plate lanes of bucolic Surrey, the birdsong is falling silent.