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.

Logo

Website / 01.02.2019

A major update to the site was carried out over the preceding weekend, which has left two considerable problems and a minor problem to be fixed.

Logo

Website / 18.01.2019

Before the site went live in early October, I kept track on its progress. On 1.9.18 I noted that the Gallery only had 42 pages instead of 72. By 19.9.18 there were 72 pages. However, having now curated the Gallery for the past three weeks, I discovered that some of the missing pages had got lost in translation, ie some of the pages were not successfully migrated from the old to the new site. A tell-tale sign was the 3 remnant night images; proof that 9 of the images which made up the page had been lost. To cover for this, a number of back end pages consisted entirely of birds, fungi and rainforest plants, as if they were mini album pages. Rectifying this was in itself, cumbersome additional work, to curating the entire Gallery in the manner adopted for the Albums. Thankfully the job is now done, though I tend to be consistently inconsistent in this project and I will need to check all the texts for missed typos.

 

Logo

Other / 11.01.2019

I met Hilary Furlong over coffee today. She organises a monthly programme of afternoon events at the Zamia Theatre on behalf of the Tamborine Mountain Progress Association. She had asked me to show some of my videos when I attended one of last year’s events and we wanted to fix a date for my presentation. We settled on Saturday April 27.

 

Logo

Film Diary / 02.01.2019

What better way to start 2019 than with a night filming walk in Joalah National Park. Dan (thanks to school holidays) joined Mark, Robyn, Karen and me on a warm night. We saw several leaf-tailed geckos, a pie dish beetle, plenty of garden orb spiders, a male harvestman, a couple of semi-slugs and a dwarf crowned snake. I filmed a species of dragonfly which I don’t recall having seen before, a greengrocer cicada nymph moulting into adulthood and just about the biggest giant water spider ever. I wish all an excellent 2019.

Logo

Website / 26.12.2018

Taking as little time off as possible to celebrate the festive season, such as putting in a full day’s work on Boxing Day (bliss), I have been working my way through the Albums. I have re-captured a few images on most pages so that each page now has the bigger enlargements, not just the first three or four pages. I have also updated and expanded the accompanying texts.  

 

Logo

Film Diary, Other / 19.12.2018

Exactly twenty years ago, I wrote the first entry in my Film Diary. It was about filming the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean. The project’s duration didn’t figure in my thoughts at the time. One thing I could not have predicted was that the 20th anniversary coincided with a scheduled night walk. Before we set out, we – Hugh, Jaap, Mark, Robyn, Lumart, Karen and me – raised a glass of Veuve Clicquot to the health of the project, which I want to keep going as long as I can, and exchanged heartfelt words and thoughts.

At Lumart’s suggestion, after a long absence and two weather delays, we were at Witches Falls National Park. Paradoxically, recent walks have been both shorter and longer than ever. Shorter in distance covered, longer in time filming. This may have been the shortest yet. The track into the park comprises a level path which extends more than a kilometre before the descent to the shelf land which is its core. It was 10 o’clock when we turned back towards the car park and we were a fair distance from the first steps downhill. Even then, we found two frogs I had never… Read Complete Text