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 / 10.03.2010

Katja emailed me saying that Dallas’s XML file failed validation and needed further work. I forwarded Katja’s email to Dallas and he copied me in on his reply to her, which was all Greek to me.

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Website / 03.03.2010

Four months ago I asked Dallas Wallace, a local IT expert, if he could scrape the website gallery to create an XML file for the Encyclopaedia of Life to complete the process of The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain becoming a Content Partner. After a succession of missed self-imposed deadlines by Dallas, I today sent the file to Katja Schulz at the EOL.

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Film Diary / 22.02.2010

Tonight we filmed in Witches Falls National Park for the first time. It takes longer to get to the rainforest proper, but we felt we should at last try our luck there. The first creature I filmed was a Giant Barred Frog, regarded as endangered. Not surprisingly, I had never seen the frog before. Later we saw a Rough-scaled Snake, one of a handful of the Mountain’s dangerous snakes. It obligingly stayed still in the vegetation close to the path. Unfortunately Jaap’s spotlight was playing up so I only had a limited opportunity to film it.

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Film Diary / 15.02.2010

For the first time since I started using my HDV camera, I was able to film an intriguing event in the form of a host of yellow butterflies attracted to the yellow flowers of a native tree on which they apparently breed. I had never seen so many of the butterflies. In the last few years I only ever saw four or so, but now there were a score or more.

After dark we went to the Knoll National Park, with a storm rolling towards the Mountain from the west. We reckoned we had an hour before the storm arrived and so it proved. Numbers of Great Barred Frogs rested on the path as if in anticipation of the rain. We were lucky to encounter a Brown Tree Snake taking its time to negotiate the path. On our way back to the entrance I was able to film a Giant Panda Snail eating a fungus.

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Film Diary / 08.02.2010

Late in the afternoon I stopped to talk with a couple of ladies who have guided me to some excellent subjects for filming, when I noticed a pair of White-headed Pigeons perched on a power line. These birds are not that common. It was years since I had filmed one, high up in a tree, and partly obscured. A man who lived in the street explained that the birds were attracted to the birdfeeder of a nearby house. I decided to go and get my camera only to find that the birds had gone. However, within moments of my arrival one of them returned to the power line in front of the house. I started to set up, but the bird flew out of sight onto the house’s verandah, only to reappear on the top rail of the balustrade, allowing me an excellent shot. This is a large bird as are a number of Australia’s other pigeons.

 

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Other / 22.01.2010

Received the Greenscreen Festival 2010 call for entries. The festival is in Eckernfoerde, Germany, in September and entries must be in by April 16. I entered last year’s festival with my DVD The Beauty of Overlooked Things.