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.
I posted the replacement MOV file to Simon Smith together with the DVDs of Supplements 1-3, so we can claim that they have now been officially published, complete with slick and their own species list. The supplements are each on a single DVD in the one case and the set costs $150.
On 30 November, the day after I got back from Cambodia, I bumped into Jaap at North Tamborine. He told me about a confirmed sighting of a Tiger Snake on the Mountain two weeks previously. I spoke to Doug White who explained that the snake had been seen at night in MacDonald National Park. I suggested to Doug that the Queensland Museum and the Environmental Protection Agency needed to be told because the snake is not recognised as occurring on the Mountain. Today Jaap sent me photos of the snake, which certainly looks like a Tiger Snake. I had to remove the Tiger Snake frame from my Gallery based on what I had been told by Jaap, the Museum and the EPA. Once I know that the Museum accepts the identification, we can restore the frame to its rightful place.
My second visit to film Golden Whistlers from the living quarters of a house next to the Wild Garden. The house is raised on poles, so that the camera was on a level with the birds, who either perch on a wild tobacco tree or a more leafy White Bollygum tree. I had long lusted after this very pretty bird with its beautiful, full throated song. The male has a bright yellow underside, a black head, a black collar beneath a white throat, and olive green and black wings. The female has a white underside and fawn head and wings.
Having checked Steve’s DVD master of Supplement 3, I was horrified to discover some content errors, such as a misplaced sub-title and a split second loss of image. These errors were on the MOV file I had posted to the National Film & Sound Archive 3 weeks ago. So I alerted Simon Smith who sent an email to Steve querying the nature of the error because there was nothing technically wrong with the MOV file. Steve emailed a reply explaining that we were dealing with incorrect content.
Night filming at the Knoll National Park. Jaap had fitted a new battery to his spotlight. Olle Bakker, on a visit from Sweden where he now lives, had carried my tripod in the rainforest when I was filming the original archive and took on the job for old times’ sake. This was his first experience of night filming. I filmed beetles, a ladybird, a Brown Huntsman spider, a cricket, trapdoor spiders and a Brushtail Possum.
Cambodia 22 – 29 November Of late I have visited Europe every other year with the intention of seeing another part of the world in the intervening year. Because of the global financial crisis I had no intention of going anywhere in 2009 until the lure of cheap airfares prompted me to book a week’s stay in Cambodia (entry 7 April this year) to at last realise a long-cherished desire of mine to see Angkor Wat. By the time I had made all the necessary arrangements, my week overseas turned out to be just about the most expensive of any I have experienced during a lifetime of travel. But what a week it was . . .
I did not expect to see a set of traffic lights in Siem Reap (a two-hour flight north of Singapore), identical to many I had encountered in China, with an illuminated display for the road traffic, showing the number of seconds to go before the lights changed. I came to Cambodia with mixed feelings about the country (misgivings about its politics, coupled with admiration of its ancient culture), but I liked what I saw on the short drive from the airport… Read Complete Text
