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

Other / 27.02.2018

Steve and I uploaded a further five videos to vimeo, to add to the five we uploaded on the 13th when we had to upgrade our presence to vimeo plus, because we had exceeded the permitted storage capacity for vimeo basic. These were the first new videos we have uploaded since May last year, having been otherwise engaged. There are a further twenty in the pipeline.

Logo

Other, Website / 24.02.2018

Apologies to everyone who has been unable to access the website since we had to close it down in October last year because it became corrupted by malicious people. It has been very painful for me not to have a website all this time and to continue to share information, which is the site’s raison d’être. Thankfully, after an upgrade to the system, we are back online. Further work is required to fully restore the site and carry out hoped for improvements. Fingers crossed and watch this space.

Logo

My Travels / 19.02.2018

For the past little while I have been checking deals for flights to Longreach in the second half of April ahead of my annual visit to Simon and Nicole, but drew a blank. Today  I found an attractive deal for early May, which I was close to booking until I was floored by a request to complete the travel insurance and global warming mitigation options which I had ignored and now couldn’t find. I gave up and tried again, only the price had significantly increased for the return leg and I gave up again. Fortunately Qantas sent me an email requesting me to finalise the original booking by midnight. The uncompleted items were on the same page as the payment details and were quickly dealt with.

Logo

Film Diary / 08.02.2018

This morning, I filmed sulphur-crested cockatoos in the park opposite my flat, eating the nuts of the bunya pine, several of which grace the park. The cones, which can weigh as much as 10 kg, drop to earth in January and February. For the past two years no cones had fallen. This season there was a bumper crop. The birds are well equipped to get at the nuts, tearing at the thick outer covering with their powerful beaks, while keeping the cone steady with their equally powerful feet.

Logo

Film Diary / 03.01.2018

There were some familiar subjects presenting themselves at excellent angles for filming, two being a weevil and the hooded semi-slug (the fifth time I have filmed it and always in Palm Grove National Park). One new subject was a spider with a bright green patch on the back of its abdomen. I also filmed some tiny fungi whose stems seemed no thicker than a human hair.

Logo

Film Diary / 20.12.2017

Mark, Lumart, Jaap and I had our hands full with a wide variety of critters in MacDonald National Park.  I filmed a skink, a house centipede on a leaf, which stood out from its background far more than the previous specimens in my footage. I also filmed a moth, a juvenile carpet python in a tree, a pie dish beetle, a moulting cockroach and a male wasp belonging to a sub-family whose males are winged and carry around the females during mating. We found the most spectacular subject, new to all of us, on our way out – a batwing gum moth caterpillar. It is one of Australia’s biggest. I estimate it was more than 12 cm long and was nearly as thick as my thumb. At first it was still, but then began to move and gyrate.