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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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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Other / 28.11.2024

Today I submitted my 24th and final fortnightly piece of the year to the paper and I am gratified to report that every one of them featured material from my Animal Builders album. A recent item was about repurposing a habitable space which may or may not have been made by an animal. I had completely forgotten that I had filmed the subject in early 2016, so much so that the three images I selected are the most recent to be added to the album, which only happened at the beginning of this month.

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Other / 25.11.2024

The day after my birthday, I saw the urologist for the six month follow-up after the kidney stone removal. I was a bit apprehensive about the appointment, having endured another unpleasant bladder ultrasound a week ago. No new stones are forming and the urologist doesn’t need to see me again. I shall continue to take my daily anti-gout pill. The news could not have been better.

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Website / 24.11.2024

Jackie advised that the best way forward is for me to buy the gallery plugin so that she can ask the company for help.

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Website / 19.11.2024

The issue boils down to the discrepancy between the admin site text layout and the website text layout. In the admin site, there is a panel for the title and next to it, a panel for the italicised species name. Below them is a panel for the body text. On the website, this translates into all the information being contained in a single panel below the enlarged image. The title and unitalicized species name abut onto the body text without a break.

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Film Diary / 12.11.2024

This morning I photographed a green tree frog resting on my garage door. In January 1999, I filmed one on the door of Unit 3. It was among the first animals I filmed. It had snuck under a cobweb which gave the illusion that the presence of the frog had predated that of the cobweb. The species is native to northern and eastern regions of Australia and to the lowlands of New Guinea. It can grow up to 11.5 cm long.

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Website / 01.11.2024

Jackie stated that the plugin which dates from when the site was created, may no longer be supported. I sent her an email showing how I want the text below the image to look.