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 / 08.05.2007

I had a half-hour live Queensland-wide interview on ABC Radio with Steve Austin, my favourite presenter, which apparently went very well. I enjoyed doing it – though, as ever, there were things I should have mentioned that I didn’t.

Since we launched the archive and website I have done a number of live radio interviews, either over the phone or in the studio. I only do them live, you know. Seriously, I have so far found them a lot of fun. I particularly recall an interview last year with another excellent presenter, Trevor Jackson on ABC Coast FM.

 

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Not The Brisbane Line / 02.04.2007

My pet archive spin-off project is the idea of a documentary series about biodiversity.

That was my reason for attending Wildscreen 2006. It was the opportunity to meet producers and senior TV executives and talk to them about my concept, which has the working title The Abundance of Life.

It was always the longest of long shots. As a last throw of the dice, I today sent the concept to the Head of Development at the BBC Natural History Unit. In my covering letter I made it clear that I wanted to entrust the concept entirely to the NHU because I feel that it is uniquely able to make the kind of series I have in mind. Moreover I have no desire to be a filmmaker or cinematographer, even though I would be happy to help develop the concept and possibly be involved in other ways.

Should anything happen you’ll hear about it. Meanwhile I am publishing the material on this site: ‘You read it HERE first’.

THE ABUNDANCE OF LIFE

CONCEPT

Planet earth is teeming with life. Only a fraction of all the species (about 1.8 million)… Read Complete Text

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Other / 15.03.2007

Five segments from the archive have been posted to YouTube.

www.youtube.com

The clips can also be accessed here. More will be added from time to time. I'll let you know when.

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Not The Brisbane Line / 09.02.2007
I hope my Tamborine Mountain Archive will inspire others to do similar projects.

For anyone interested in how I set about it I have made some notes about the process, illustrated with a Flow Chart, extracts from my Film Diary, shot selection lists etc.

See my Notes.

This is not an exhaustive account. Hopefully it provides a fair idea of how complex a process making the archive was.

As you can see from the Flow Chart, the archive consists of two data streams. The arrows show how the streams progress and how they relate to one another.

I employed two editors, one for Parts 1 to 5, the other for Part 6.

PARTS 1 TO 5

The Film Diary lists the number of each camera tape and consists of a brief jotting-down of what and where I filmed each day. There are 1105 diary entries.

A whole day’s filming could be of a single garden – such as entry 248 which consists of 120 shots – or it could entail filming a titan stick insect, a couple of wallabies, vegetation above the western shelf land, a… Read Complete Text

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Other / 02.02.2007

A segment prompted by the archive was shown in Australia on Totally Wild, Channel Ten’s national programme for children. It included naturalist Doug White with whom I made a very productive foray into MacDonald National Park, filming more fauna species for the archive than on any other visit to a national park. Appropriately, the segment was filmed in the park one morning last November and was fun to do. The young presenter was very good.

Doug and I spoke to camera about the Mountain’s biodiversity, its fragility in the light of the population growth in South East Queensland and the value to the planet of rainforest like that on the Mountain. The segment included aerial footage by Hugh Alexander and footage by me of fungi, birds, insects and views of the escarpment. It was pleasing to have some of my footage broadcast at last.

I was delighted that shots of a giant Cereus cactus as high as a two-storey house and with the bulk of a tree were used, because the conditions which allow the rainforest to accommodate its biodiversity also allow this alien from southern USA and Central America to flourish… Read Complete Text

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The Brisbane Line / 31.01.2007

I have just got back from a twelve day visit to Tasmania, staying with Hugh and Pauline Alexander who have been renting a house near Launceston for the past year. I stayed with them for five days last March. On this visit we made a six day, five night trip to Strahan, Lake Pedder and Hobart.

Then as now, the one place in Tasmania I wanted to see more than any other was the Styx Valley, home to the biggest recorded Eucalyptus regnans, the world’s tallest flowering plant.

But the Tasmanians I had asked about the Styx were vague as to its whereabouts. It is not part of a national park, but is an active logging area managed by Forestry Tasmania on behalf of a timber industry bent on clear-felling as much of Tasmania’s old-growth forest as it can get its hands on – for no better purpose than to provide woodchip for making news-print.

After crossing the Styx River we finally came to the Big Tree.

CROSSING THE STYX

Talk about unknown knowing. It is still holiday time in Tasmania,
so we booked all our accommodation in advance, choosing to spend… Read Complete Text