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 collected the camera from the repairer. This was the first camera fault I have encountered during the entire project. I damaged my previous camera when I failed to stabilize the tripod, looking on in helpless horror as it fell to the ground. That piece of negligence cost me $700. Repairing my current camera cost $508.10.
More of WHSHT (click the more button below) emerging from the woodwork in the form of an email from the musician David Toop seeking information in connection with a project of his on the late John Latham. John was a bit of a father figure to us young artists when we started WHSHT. David contacted me via the website. He said some nice things about my project.
WHSHT – THE WORLD HEALTH, SANITY AND HYGIENE TRUST
It seems surreal to contemplate that while I was having a ball in the avant-garde art scene of late swinging 60s London, the Neocons were starting to put together an agenda that would capture American politics more than thirty years later.
The ball started for me a few years earlier during my time as a student at Hornsey College of Art in north London. I was part of the Light/Sound Workshop which created light projections on screens or in spaces, to improvisational sound accompaniment. I cite it as one of the inspirations for the rock concert lightshows which were pioneered by the Pink Floyd. Mike Leonard, an architect… Read Complete Text
Today a fault occurred in the camera’s tape loading mechanism. It would not descend. Fortunately the ejector still worked so I was able to retrieve my current tape.
For the past fortnight I have been filming Wompoo Pidgeons in a Moreton Bay fig tree adjacent to the house on whose lawn and drive I have filmed the pademelons. The tree merges into the rainforest of Palm Grove National Park. Wompoo Pigeons are typical of the breed in Australia, visually striking and of an imposing size, particularly this species which has a pale grey head and neck, green wings with a yellow band, a purple breast and yellow abdomen. The tree is as much a favourite place of the pigeons as the lawn is of the small marsupials; there must be twenty or so birds in its canopy. They are elusive to film and always stay a long way from the camera.
Because of my wish to become an EOL Content Partner, I need to identify as many of the species on my Gallery pages as possible and emailed a request list to the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum. I received a very prompt reply, directing my plant species queries to the Brisbane Herbarium and advising me that the fauna identification may take some time. I also emailed a mycologist whom I met at a forum in Brisbane (see blog entry for 25-27 June 2007) for help with identifying fungi, and a Mountain resident who is an expert on grasses.
