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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Book / 23.11.2020

A Queensland-based library supplier, emailed an order for a library in the Northern Territory. Suppliers don’t mention libraries with their orders, but I worked out the library because the librarian told me she had ordered the book via that supplier. I listed 4 Northern Territory libraries.

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Film Diary / 20.11.2020

This morning I photographed and filmed my 5th species of bag or case moth. It caught my eye, low on the picket fence in Driscoll Lane, when I was on my walk and once I saw it move, I photographed it. I returned with my video camera and filmed it making its way to the top of the fence. This evening Don Herbison-Evans replied to the email I sent him. Much to my relief, he was able to identify the species from the attached photo I included.

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Other / 19.11.2020

An email arrived from a lady at the Western Australia New Museum, requesting the use of four of my species videos for the museum’s platform. In my reply I granted permission on the understanding that the videos would be shown complete with opening and closing titles, in which I and my website are credited. PS On 28.11.20  I was told that the videos would be downloaded in full with my name in the attribution line.

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Film Diary / 13.11.2020

What is it with Driscoll Lane and flying insects? On my walk this morning I noticed a new-to-me tussock moth caterpillar on a picket fence and cursed myself for not having my stills camera with me. I cursed myself even more when I saw a magnificent tachinid fly on a nearby power poll. I estimate that it took five minutes for me to get home and a couple of minutes more to retrieve my camera and drive back to the location. The fly was where I left it and, although it shifted its position because of my attention, it stayed put and allowed me to photograph it.  This seems as remarkable as finding the Australian emerald dragonfly still in the hedge just beyond the power poll, when I returned with my video camera and filmed it from various angles, for a good half hour, six years ago. The tussock moth caterpillar was nowhere to be seen.

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Film Diary / 10.11.2020

Jaap texted me this morning that he had a tawny frogmouth nest with an adult and two nestlings in a tree in his garden. I have seen adults and young over the years, but never a nest. I went to his place soon after lunch and set up my camera on his deck. It was a breezy day. There was little happening, but I filmed the nest, which was rather perfunctory and looked too small to accommodate the birds. I left my tripod, vowing to return in late afternoon when the nest was likely to be more animated. And so it proved. I filmed both nestlings, one of which looked in my direction with open eyes, yawning occasionally. The wind ruffled the birds’ feathers and blew the vegetation in front of, or entirely way from, the nest. After filming hardly anything for the year until the end of September, I have shot 50% more footage since then.

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Book / 30.10.2020

In planning library sales in the absence of Victoria, I completely overlooked South Australia. I compiled a list of 25 public libraries in the State and today one of them ordered the book from my website. PS 10.11.20 A second library emailed an order. I had been told by a number of librarians that my book needed to be on a monthly new book list circulated to the State’s libraries by the Adelaide based library supplier, so yesterday, I duly submitted the details.