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.
This afternoon, Steve came to my place to show me the contents he has copied to the SSD and supervise copying items which I have compiled. Although the species videos have Steve’s abbreviated titles, they sufficiently convey the subject matter. Regardless, the best way to find out what the video contains, is to play it. By the time Steve left, the SSD was complete.
I took a photo, of a large Funnel ant mound on the corner of a grass verge. It was the first time, since I initially videoed the mounds in 2001, that I have actually seen ants on them. The mound appeared after a weekend of thunder storms but not a lot of rain. There are eight Australian species in the genus out of a worldwide total of 200. I noticed winged individuals, which are male and female reproductive ants, entering the mound. You have to look carefully to see the three ants in the photo. They are only about 5 mm long.
This year, the fresh green leaves of Spring appeared some two weeks later than usual on the deciduous trees lining Southport Avenue, thanks to a cold Winter. The English oak, which I photographed, is native to most of Europe and western Asia. There are no native oaks in Australia. This is a particularly remarkable tree. Despite being half dead, it retains a vigorous growth of new leaves. Deciduous native trees grow in the northern parts of Australia and shed their leaves to conserve water supply to the tree. Deciduous trees in the northern hemisphere lose their leaves as protection against cold weather.
Today I compiled the index for the contents on the Legacy Solid State Drive. The first item is the link to my WEBSITE in The National Library of Australia. It is followed by VIDEOS – Species Videos, The Rainforest at Night, Driscoll Lane, The Beauty of Overlooked Things and Looking out for the Overlooked. Next is KUTTNER IMAGE LIBRARY – Photos and Video Frames, then WRITING – My Book, the Brisbane Line and Other Essays and My Travels, concluding with KUTTNER ART – Videos, Slides, Artworks and Documents.
This morning, Steve and I went to Office Works in Burleigh to buy a two terabyte Solid-State Drive (SSD) to house all the data from my project which I wish to keep for posterity. Steve retired from Bond University last May and we are in the process of putting our more than twenty years of collaboration to bed. The website, unedited and edited footage are all officially curated, which is most pleasing. My digital legacy is of data that I have selected with Steve’s help. It will be the sole repository of my Image Library with its thousands of video frames and photos. Only edited video footage, primarily of hundreds of short species videos plus some longer videos will be stored. One or two of the latter may, or may not be available elsewhere. I am including all my essays, which also appear on the website. Some were published elsewhere online. I have added a brief text to these, to place them in their proper context. Steve is going through the many hard drives he has used over the years, to see what of value they contain. I will leave the SSD to Simon.
I noticed a small dark patch on the dark grey door of the garage in Central Ave, which could only have been a moth, as a closer inspection revealed. I was on my morning walk, and had to return with my camera and a step ladder. Peter Hendry confirmed it as a new species for my Moths album, which is an increasingly rare and all the more exciting occurrence. It occurs in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. Wingspan is about 3.5 cm.
