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 / 11.03.2021

Today, Peter Hendry confirmed that a moth I photographed yesterday was a new species of moth for my album, and one he has not seen. There have been a marked number of such finds since the owner reinstated the old light bulbs in late January. The newfangled previous bulbs proved unattractive to moths.

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Book / 09.03.2021

There were nine libraries in South Australia that I did not contact last November, an omission I made good today.

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Film Diary / 24.02.2021

This evening I had dinner with Steve and Paulina and delivered a memory card with over two hours of new footage for Steve to download and time code, covering the period from 20 September last year to February 1 this year.

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My Travels / 15.02.2021

For someone who enjoys travel as much as I do, it was especially good, during these covid times, to fly to Tasmania on February 9, after too long an interval. Suellen met me at Launceston airport, an hour’s journey from her home at Clarence Point, as the light was fading.  The house Craig and Suellen have bought is even more beautiful than their mountain eyrie. Its Japanese garden, planted by previous owners, is widely known in the locality. It was overgrown and unkempt, when they moved in. Craig has spent months and a small fortune to resurrect its former glory and build a labyrinth of paths which must stretch for several hundred metres in all. They have been in Tasmania for just over a year and love living there.

The house is separated by a road and grassed area from the Tamar River, where it widens into promontories, that on the far bank concealing Bell Bay, Tasmania’s main commercial port, and the one on the near bank shielding Beauty Point from view. Beyond the river are ranges of hills and far-off mountains. The field behind the house was animated by sheep and the occasional rabbit. Flocks of masked… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 03.02.2021

This afternoon I visited Jaap and Elisabeth. When I arrived, Elisabeth asked me if I had seen a moth on a tree next to the front path. I descended the steps from the deck to take a look and saw a magnificent hawk moth with outspread wings. I dashed home to get my camera and took many photos. PS Peter Hendry duly identified the moth, which was a male. The wingspan is cited as 12 cm on a number of websites, but I am convinced that it was substantially more.

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Film Diary / 24.01.2021

The other day I spoke to the owner of the ‘moths’ garage about not having photographed or filmed a moth there since last September (the 8th, to be precise). We wondered whether the absence of moths had anything to do with the LED bulbs he had installed and he assured me that he would revert to the previous bulbs to see if this made a difference. Yesterday, after overnight rain, there were plenty of moths at the garage, but I didn’t have my camera with me, though I was happy to see that the owner had been true to his word and kindly re-instated the old bulbs. This morning yielded only two or three moths, one of which I photographed. Its wingspan was only 1.5 cm.