Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 


 

The Film Diary includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

 

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 


 

A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 


 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

 


 

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Other / 17.02.2011

The grant application was submitted today. We will be informed about the outcome in May.

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Film Diary / 07.02.2011

I have been filming a camp of Grey-headed flying foxes, Australia’s largest bat with a 1m wingspan and weighing up to 1kg, in Joalah NP. Their noise and the stench of their urine are pervasive. Their impact on the rainforest vegetation is noticeable. Even when they are roosting in the tops of palm trees, they are a fair distance from the camera. I filmed numerous adults cloaking young under their wings. Today a drop of bat urine hit my eye. They say urine is sterile. I had long wanted to film flying foxes, thinking it would most likely be at night because I thought they only visited the Mountain for food. It was only recently that I heard about the camp in Joalah.

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Other / 01.02.2011

I have received the information required to apply for a Regional Art Development Fund grant. The grant is for creating data files and DVDs of the 100 plus hours of the video archive for the State Library of Queensland. Steve got the library’s understanding that we include a high resolution version for future  editing purposes.

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Film Diary / 25.01.2011

It’s amazing how creatures can take hold of you. About a month ago Hugh Alexander noticed a daddy long legs-like creature when we were night filming in the Knoll NP. It had a tiny body and immensely long legs, but what was utterly remarkable was what we took to be eye stalks, many times its body length. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Well, today we saw 3 in all, at the same spot on rocks next to the path; the third on our way back. In the meantime we found out a bit about harvestmen, but nothing about the ones Hugh discovered. Harvestmen are arachnids (8 legged). Their bodies are unsegmented and the stalks are sexual organs. To totally dombfound us, the third specimen’s stalks had an equally long extension forming a right angle.

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Other / 13.01.2011

Today I received the great news that EOL is now able to harvest videos from vimeo. Compared with generating new website gallery pages and converting the data they contain to XML, making the videos harvestable only involves providing the binomial (scientific name) and family to which a species belongs, adding some specific tags and including the relevant licensing agreement.

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Other / 12.01.2011

I received an email from Lynne Sealie, the communications manager of ALA, which is an international partner of EOL, praising our website and flagging various linkages, including displaying my images on their site.