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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Website / 06.03.2026

Carrie sent an email showing how to sort the images which I used to good effect when I replaced the three new ones. Disruptions to the site really take it out of me and, alas, I tend to send some incoherent emails as I grapple with what needs to be done. The upsets this time and in 2024 are likely due to WordPress having to support so many images online, a seemingly inherent fault of the site. Watch this space. PS 9.3.26 Carrie emailed me, explaining that large image libraries can make management a little more cumbersome, but is a fairly common situation rather than a fundamental problem, which is good to know. WordPress remains the most popular format globally, for creating websites.

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Website / 27.02.2026

I emailed Carrie Wilson of Scenic Rim Design, accepting her Hosting and Care plan for my website which she sent an hour ago, but could not attend to immediately. Keer Moriarty, the editor of the Tamborine Mountain News, gave me Carrie’s contact information on 13.2.26 and Carrie and I have exchanged numerous emails since, which included a most helpful one on 24.2.26 which at last enabled me to upload three new images. Unfortunately, one of them ended up behind an image from last year and I could not find a means to change the sort order. There is a Sort Images panel at the top of the gallery, which I opened and foolishly hit on the first of the four options. Immediately the gallery was made unrecognisable and it became clear that the only way order could be restored was for Carrie to install the website database to 26.2.26 which she did on 4.3.26, requesting  confirmation that the Albums are in the correct sort order, which I provided.

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Film Diary / 22.02.2026

I wanted to photograph the cycad for several days. It had been relocated to the edge of a block which was cleared of buildings and vegetation. It was beginning to establish itself when a fierce wind split the trunk, causing part of it to fall to the ground. The trunk can grow to a diameter of 80 cm. Its outer layer is covered by the persistent remains of leaf bases.  The cycad is an ancient, long-lived and slow-growing species, which is endemic to coastal south-eastern Queensland and north-eastern New South Wales. The cylindrical cone is among the largest of all cycad cones.

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Film Diary / 17.02.2026

The fungi, which I photographed today, were among several growing on or near the same tree stump in Central Ave which I photographed in April 2025. I sent the mycologist three images, hopefully of different species, and I await a reply from him.

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My Travels / 10.02.2026

I was away from January 26 until February 10. The day after, was the 39th anniversary of my arrival in Australia from the UK as a new resident. I determined to rectify the omission of favouring other overseas destinations over New Zealand after my return from the UK and Europe at the beginning of August, 2024. During my stay in England I was given advance notice of the wedding of my ex brother-in-law’s daughter at a castle in Ireland in August 2026. Planning two overseas trips in the same year was a novelty and a challenge to my finances, though I paid for the New Zealand flights, insurance, accommodation and tours between August 8 and December 17 2025.

The Air New Zealand flight from Brisbane to Auckland on a 787, my favourite plane, was excellent; the food good, and I watched Paddington in Peru, which I had missed in the cinema. I’m averse to lugging my case long distances. Alas, due to a stuff-up retrieving it at Auckland’s International Terminal, thanks to our flight’s luggage being unloaded onto two carousels, my already tight deadline to check in for my flight to Kerikeri, seemed unachievable, in the absence of… Read Complete Text

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Website / 20.01.2026

Further texts were exchanged about the admin site and I told Jackie that I would rather not hand over a site with such a glaring fault to a new developer and that I would pursue contacts after my return from New Zealand.