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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Film Diary / 18.11.2021

I didn’t have to wait long to photograph a new moth at the garage. Indeed, I photographed two. The first moth flew away when I returned for a better shot, but then I noticed a second moth which I photographed instead, but realised that I needed my stepladder, which I duly fetched and used. I thought I already had the first moth, but wasn’t sure. The expert confirmed that both are new.

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Film Diary / 17.11.2021

Yesterday, I photographed possibly unprecedented multiple satin bowerbird bowers, at the same location where, in August 2019, I photographed extremely rare twin bowers. The sun shining through the surrounding vegetation resulted in photos with excessive contrast.  I returned today and benefited from the even light provided by cloud cover. The builder had erected a line of four bowers, plus a bower behind the one on the right. The amount of decoration is around the average or a bit less for a single bower, which was the case when there were only two bowers on the site.

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Film Diary / 05.11.2021

I live in hope of finding new moths at the garage. This morning I photographed what looked like a moth species new to my album, only to have the expert identify it as an existing species, but one which is notoriously variable. A few days ago, I photographed a moth which I knew I had, but this time was able to take a much better shot, which is always most satisfying.

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Book / 01.11.2021

The lockdown officially ended on October 22. Between June 16 and July 30, I shipped 9 books to library suppliers, but I logged more orders than that by phone. I suspect some libraries did not follow through nor could I get clear answers about which library I was actually supplying. There is little point in resuming contact with libraries there, until the New Year.

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Other / 23.10.2021

We are experiencing an infestation of European garden snails. They like the wheelie bins we use for garden waste, but are particularly fond of our letterboxes with their paper contents. The contractor who cuts the lawn and trims the hedges left an invoice in my letterbox, the day before bin night, which is the only time I open it because I have a post office box for my mail. There was just enough of the invoice left for me to post it for payment, to our building manager.

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My Travels / 14.10.2021

Decades after being smitten by a photo of Ayer’s Rock (now named Uluru), I first glimpsed it as we landed at Connellan Airport after flying from Brisbane on October 10. Alas, cloud hid the red centre, which I longed to see. I was travelling with Simon and Nicole. Such family time is all the more precious at my age. Ayer’s Rock Resort is built below the height of the sand dunes, which, with sand plains harbouring salt pans, and the three immense rock outcrops of Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Mount Conner, define this part of Australia. An excellent guide book I bought at Ayer’s Rock Resort cited a dune height of 13 metres, whereas our helicopter pilot quoted 16 metres.  Although the terrain is semi-arid, vegetation abounds – mainly mulga and desert oak trees and spinifex grass, with mallee and river red gum trees and various other shrubs and flowering plants – giving the land a pleasingly verdant appearance. Mulga trees and bushes are noted for their ability to collect water, whereas the rolled leaf of spinifex grass reduces the amount of water lost to the atmosphere. Spinifex is not nutritious for stock but it provides a good habitat… Read Complete Text