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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Book / 30.06.2022

Following my accountant’s advice, I will no longer contact new outlets, (which indeed I have not done for most of the year) effectively winding up the business. The ATO (Australian Taxation Office) has been advised.

 

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My Travels / 20.06.2022

Gina handed over my tickets and vouchers – tickets for flights and rail travel, vouchers for accommodation, car transfers and the Rhine cruise. I leave on June 23. The rail pass is only available as an app. I have hard copies of the six days for which I have seat reservations, but the remaining four days appear to be out of reach. In reality, I will have to go to the rail travel office at St Pancras Station today week, to sort matters out and expect to put up with a long wait. A complicating factor is the rail and tube strikes currently occurring in the UK. Ah, the joys of travel, but then, I stubbornly refuse to have a smart phone.

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Film Diary / 17.06.2022

A pair of tawny frogmouths were perched on my balcony when I drew my curtain this morning. I took several photos as they moved their heads culminating in a pose with open beak, which I have never previously seen. Frogmouths are an attractive subject both because of their striking appearance and their quirky behaviour, such as sitting in the middle of the road at night. Although they look like owls and are nocturnal, frogmouths are not raptors. They lack talons and a beak capable of ripping flesh. Instead, they catch their insect prey on the wing. They are found throughout mainland Australia and Tasmania. When I closed the curtain in the evening, the birds were still there. Next morning, they were gone.

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My Travels / 17.05.2022

This morning I paid Gina for my accommodation in Amsterdam (both before and after the cruise) and Bruges, and transfers from airport to hotel, hotel to railway station and hotel to boat. On May 4 I paid for the rail pass, after a lot of toing and froing to allow for sufficient time to change trains while avoiding having to linger between trains.

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My Travels / 08.04.2022

Today I booked my London hotel, including eight breakfasts for less than £90 – which is far less than they would cost here, paying from my UK bank account, having paid for the airfare on February 25 and the balance of the Rhine cruise on April 4.

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Other / 05.04.2022

Today, I had the last sentence of the PRESERVATION paragraph on the home page removed. It read: The Image Library is in the collection of the Queensland Museum.

On January 7, I uploaded a post about updating my Image Library for the Queensland Museum and expressed disquiet because the Digital Asset Management System Administrator, Donna Miller, was unaware of my donation when we spoke on January 6. On January 31 I was told by email, that since the donation was made, the Museum had adopted a more rigorous and time-consuming system for adding images to its digital collection and the resources to process my images in a timely fashion did not exist. Moreover, the curation policy requires that the Museum image portals hold the most appropriate, unique and quality images for either staff, public or researchers. This information and the sense that Donna was unfamiliar with the library’s content only intensified my disquiet. I was nonetheless permitted to re-edit my photos from 2014 to 2018 as per the March 11 post.

On March 29, Donna sent me an email rejecting the donation. In yesterday’s reply, I told her that I could not help feeling that she was… Read Complete Text