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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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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Film Diary / 11.02.2025

Robyn Law reminded me of a pair of brown gerygone nests she had seen, hanging from a shrub next to a footbridge over a tributary of Plunkett Creek. I drove there this morning to photograph them. The branch was below the walk way, which restricted the angle to an overhead shot. I could not get a photo showing both nests, but had to settle for a picture of each separately. I also had to wait for the breeze which caused the nests to sway incessantly, to die down sufficiently to allow a decent shot. I only saved five out of seventeen photos.

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Website / 03.02.2025

Yesterday I received an email from Melbourne IT about my domain name renewal which is due by May 1. It was the first in a series of monthly ’reminder’ emails. It emphasised that I check my eligibility to renew the name. This terrified me, because I was told the current name, unlike the one it replaced, did not require an active Australian Business Number. The first person I spoke to this morning said he would call back in an hour or two to confirm my eligibility. I phoned again in the afternoon and was told that I was eligible to renew the name. Previously I would renew the name for two years. Because of the change, I only registered the name for a year. I will revert to the two year renewal nearer the time.

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Website / 09.01.2025

The website gremlin saga was becoming a tad self-indulgent. I hadn’t heard from Jackie for a month. Her last email assured me that the matter would be fixed before Christmas. Today, after returning from the coast having driven through a cloudburst for twenty five minutes from a liquor store to a shopping centre, I uploaded a photo taken the previous day, and checking how it looked on the web page, I had to do a double take because the text accompanying the enlargement had been restored to the status quo. I emailed Jackie to let her know, saying that her actions spoke louder than the words I never heard from her and that it is demoralising when one’s website isn’t working properly. I had emailed Jackie on January 7, telling her that on the 10th I was due to pay my credit card for the plugin upgrade and that I had nothing to show for the expense. In my long experience of dealing with them, web builders are lousy communicators and do not look after their customers in the way most service providers do.

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Film Diary / 08.01.2025

In the afternoon, I took a photo of an Australian white ibis, almost five years ago to the day since I photographed my first white ibis on the mountain, which is also on page one of the Birds album. The bird was foraging in the recently mown grass in the park across the road from my unit. It was feeding in the park the following morning. I normally encounter the species on the coastal strip. I have otherwise only seen the straw-necked ibis up here. The white ibis is widespread across much of Australia and is closely related to the sacred ibis of Africa.

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Other / 04.01.2025

Simon and Nicole and Pepper are safely back in Longreach, having arrived in Brisbane on December 21. What a contrast the celebrations this time have been to last year’s. My fervent wish was for the normal Christmas trajectory to resume. Our family Christmas lunch, just the six of us, could not have been more welcome and appropriate, and the weather was ideal. Kathy is doing extremely well after her heart attack, her morale boosted by the first visit to Australia of her brother David and his wife Joyce (her third). They were in Brisbane for a few days at the end of  November. Simon and Nicole spent two nights at a B&B on the mountain. I treated them to dinner at our best restaurant and we went to the Gold Coast Motor Museum – a stay planned for last year which had to be abandoned due the extreme weather event which cut off power up here for a fortnight.

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Website / 30.11.2024

I have just bought an upgraded version of the plugin at a greatly reduced Black Friday sale price and emailed Jackie the login information. Jackie assured me that this is a one-off purchase. She thanked me for supplying the information and said that she will get this sorted. Watch this space.