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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My Travels / 19.04.2021

This afternoon I got back from my annual visit to Simon, Nicole and their blue cattle dog Pepper. The timing of the return flight was ideal, as it enabled me to buy essential food items, including vegetables for tonight’s supper. I always love being in Longreach and staying with Simon and Nicole in their spacious, comfortable home. They are busy at work and continue to flourish. They have already had their first covid jab. Pepper, who has the silkiest coat, licked me to death whenever I allowed her to. Because of Longreach’s remoteness, all eligible adults who wanted the vaccine were given it. 

Whether seen from the air or the ground, the country looks green, but much of the tall vegetation is weed and not grass. Still, there was unusually little roadkill on the road to Ilfracombe and from Ilfracombe to the 12 Mile Stone Pitching, a noteworthy hydrological construction which we visited.

The bird life in town during my stay was plentiful, with flocks of kites, little corellas and galahs filling the sky. Regulars at the feeder and bath in the backyard included sparrows, apostle birds, yellow-throated miners and peaceful, diamond and crested doves. Unlike last… Read Complete Text

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Book / 11.04.2021

The books were stacked on the pallet in four towers of thirteen. Yesterday I was perturbed to notice that the two towers further from the side wall were looking like the leaning tower of Pisa and even the two next to the side wall were beginning to lean. Prompt action was needed to prevent a damaging topple. While I was visiting friends, the handyman, who also happens to be a resident of my unit block, re-stacked the books.

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Book / 31.03.2021

Today we relocated 52 boxes of books from the container to my garage. The people renting the container will relinquish it at the end of April. The move saves me the $100 a month I paid for storage. I have a pallet in my garage which held the 15,000 copies, awaiting distribution, of my bi-monthly Tamborine Mountain Visitor newspaper – published between 1993 and 1998. I paid a handyman to fix a sheet of plywood against the back wall to complete a neat corner in which to stack the books.

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Film Diary / 29.03.2021

On my walk, I noticed a construction on the picket fence in Driscoll Lane. It was about two inches long, consisting of a spray of leaves, skewered on what looked like a twig encrusted with wood shavings. By this evening I had confirmation that this was built by the leaf case moth larva, making it the sixth such species in my album and the third seen for the first time on the picket fence. The caterpillar creates a silken sheath, encrusted with bits of leaf and twigs.

 

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Film Diary / 20.03.2021

An exchange of emails with Peter Hendry, about a moth I photographed at the garage on 7.3.21 concluded today. Peter originally thought the moth possibly belonged to the genus Tineidae. I sent Peter photos of two similar moths taken previously and, after consulting a lepidopterist friend, Peter agreed with him that all three moths are different species of the genus Philobota, a very rewarding result, even if they could not be identified to species level.

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Book / 12.03.2021

An email arrived from Port Augusta Library confirming an order via their usual supplier. This follows an exchange of emails on 10.3.21 with a librarian who is constrained by the Public Library South Australia monthly list of approved books, which typically contains 7,000 titles. My book was on the December list which cannot be accessed retrospectively by any of the libraries I contacted this month. PS By 25.3.21 I had received 5 Phase 2 orders. Once I return from Longreach on April 19, I intend to contact libraries in Victoria.