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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The Brisbane Line / 03.07.2010

I failed to mention in this Blog my contribution to The Brisbane Line last November:

CHANGE THAT NEVER WAS

Amongst leading liberal democratic nations, the US and Australia are now swimming against the electoral tide which has seen conservative governments assume or about to assume power. A majority of voters in both countries wanted change in their national politics. They chose a more liberal, compassionate government after having to contend with 8 and more than 11 years respectively, of two of the most hard-nosed conservative governments since World War 2. The newly elected leaders, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd promptly obliged with commitments on the environment and social justice. The relief and euphoria was such that it led their more ardent supporters to hope that what they regarded as the extreme and uncaring politics of George W Bush and John Howard had become history. However, as with the flagged and hoped for measures to curb excessive corporate pay in the grimmest days of the global financial crisis, it did not take long for the old ways to reappear because in the minds of the perpetrators, mere moral outrage was never going to stop business as usual.  Thus… Read Complete Text

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Other / 02.07.2010

Received the last of eight daily emails from Peter Hendry, an expert with whom Doug White put me in contact, following a presentation of my DVD Looking Out For The Overlooked at the June Landcare meeting. In one of his emails he referred to difficulty with images. I thought he was referring to mine, but it turned out he was referring to some of the reference images used to identify my moths. I wonder if the Queensland Museum knows of him. I had some moths identified via the museum. This took quite a while. I sent Peter my email, with six moths for him to identify, in the morning and received a reply that afternoon.

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Website / 29.06.2010

At long last I heard from Katja Schulz again. She told me that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain is on the verge of becoming a Content Partner on EOL. She provided me with a preview of all the pages to which I have contributed images and it was a thrill to not only see the list but very pleasing to click on an entry and see my video frame on the page. I emailed her, pointing out a couple of errors and asked her if she wants me to go through all the pages before she publishes them.

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Other / 22.06.2010

This evening I helped Steve capture 166 frames I have selected from recent tapes for our image bank.

 

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Film Diary / 13.06.2010

My friend Robyn Ashwin phoned me to report a flock of Wompoo Pigeons feeding in a fig tree behind her house. The tree was not as big as the one next to Palm Grove where I filmed the Wompoos last July, so I was able to get better close ups this afternoon.

 

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Other / 09.06.2010

I received an email from the Greenscreen Festival stating that my entry had not been selected for screening. This came as no surprise given that entries are made by broadcasters and the like.