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 paid for my trip to at long last see Angkor Wat, taking advantage of some very cheap air fares. I will be away for a week in late November, which is just right because, given the present global economic situation, I had not intended to travel overseas this year.
Was notified by email that my entry for the Green Screen Festival, The Beauty of Overlooked Things, posted on 20 March, had safely arrived in Eckernfoerde. I received no notification that my entry to FICA 11, an international environmental film festival in Brazil, posted 12 February, had been received. I don’t really regard myself as a filmmaker, but welcome the chance to circulate my work, which such festivals offer. Ideally, I would like film festivals devoted to natural history to include a category for environmental artists.
An excellent day. In the morning I filmed Wollumbinia dorsii, a newly recognised species of fresh-water turtle, named by its discoverer after herpetologist Marcus Dorse of Tamborine Mountain, a friend of mine. The footage was shot in Marc’s garden and includes him holding the turtle. Later on, I filmed a Graceful Tree Frog on the library window in North Tamborine and a stunning insect on the adjoining Westpac Bank window.
The day got better, because that night in the Knoll National Park, I filmed a spectacular moth, a Giant Panda Snail – they are huge – and a Brushtail Possum. The possum was clinging to a tree, only a couple of metres above the ground and remained there for a long time looking at us looking at it. I was able to get some good close-ups of its tail and its paws. Eventually it leaped to an adjacent tree and my view of it was partly obscured by vegetation. Fortunately I managed to zoom onto its pointed nose, at the end of which a large drip formed which duly succumbed to the effects of gravity. As we were nearing the exit, Jaap told us… Read Complete Text
Six days ago I paused on my morning walk to talk to some people I know who happened to be at their front gate, which is set back from the road, when my gaze was directed to the presence of several moths clustered around a pair of lamps on either side of the double garage door. The lamps remain on all night. I was gob-smacked. I had passed this garage most mornings for years on end and hadn’t noticed a single moth until that morning’s chance conversation. Many of the moths were tiny and could not be noticed from the street, but some were large enough to be clearly seen. For several days since, I have filmed an assortment of beautiful moths in greater numbers than at the shopping centre in North Tamborine, my erstwhile stamping ground for gathering moths. A couple of days ago I even filmed a fair sized Titan Stick Insect. It doesn’t bear thinking about the moths I have missed over the years at this location.
When I started night filming I may have shot five minutes or less of footage during a two hour walk. Now, the amount of footage has doubled. Tonight in the Knoll National Park, I was able to film a couple of Brushtail Possums. Our previous encounters with possums in the rainforest had been too brief for filming. The second possum was particularly endearing as it waited in a branch high overhead until I had finished filming two spiders on the tree’s trunk.
Another night filming session in Joalah, which yielded plenty of delights, not least because we had the alert presence of a young woman, who spotted a number of good subjects, the most unexpected of which was a Titan Stick Insect. It was a medium-sized specimen. The insects can grow to a length of 250mm. However, the truly exceptional sight was a roosting Azure Kingfisher on a branch above the self-same pool where I filmed the eel. The bird was a new species for the archive.
