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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Film Diary / 03.05.2017

Tonight at The Knoll, Mark and Lumart were present on the 150th night filming walk. The series began at the end of December 2007. The intention is to go on a walk once a week. However, we do not film during the cooler months and crew crying off and rain on the night drastically affects the number of occasions we manage to film. The total does not include the rare instances when I didn’t film anything at all. I feared this might be the case tonight until we saw a giant panda snail devouring a fungus which was part of an interesting cluster, so I filmed both. I also filmed some tiny fungi and a slime mould. After cyclone Debbie there is plenty of water in the mountain’s creeks. I hoped to see the eel, whose presence in Sandy Creek we never suspected until it appeared just over two years ago in a pool which formed immediately downstream of the bridge thanks to ex-cyclone Oswald. Alas, there was no sign of the eel in the pool. To our great joy it was spotted in the pool immediately upstream of the bridge, but did not linger long enough for me… Read Complete Text

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Other / 29.04.2017

The American production house wanted me to sign away my peace of mind in exchange for not being able to guarantee that I would be mentioned in the credits. Discovery Channel Canada submitted a similar release form. I refused to sign it because it did not include a credit for my footage. Today I received a new form with a ‘Special Thanks: Peter Kuttner’ clause which I duly signed and returned.

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Other / 26.04.2017

The touch screen on my new Canon developed a fault at the end of March. Today I collected a replacement from Videopro in Brisbane and can expect to be without my camera for a minimum of three weeks. Fortunately the viewfinder and filming were not affected by the fault.

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Other / 19.04.2017

An email arrived from a producer who works on a science news program called Daily Planet on Discovery Channel, Canada. He is producing a story on animals that use nets to catch their prey. He came across my videos of net-casting spiders on vimeo and wondered if he could use my footage. Trawling through my vimeo pages I found four videos devoted to three species of spiders, all filmed at night. I am inclined to give him the go-ahead provided I’m credited as the videographer. A few years ago an American production house wanted to use my footage but the agreement they asked me to sign put me off. We’ll see what transpires with this lot.

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Film Diary / 12.04.2017

Night filming with Jaap and Mark in Joalah is only worth noting because it was the first such foray  since February 22nd due mainly to crew availability and only one rainy night. I filmed a moth, a spiny rainforest katydid instar, a carpet python and a snail which looked new to me.

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My Travels / 11.04.2017

This morning I booked our flights to Easter Island and beyond and paid the deposit on resort accommodation there. Simon is joining me on my trip and wanted to include Buenos Aires. We shall also be overnighting in Santiago between destinations. I want to go to Easter Island because of its remoteness, having been inspired by a tv series about Britain’s overseas territories which include 3 of the remotest inhabited spots on earth. Easter Island, although it belongs to Chile, is in that august company. At Art School in the ‘60s I created a totem poll inspired by a moai in the British Museum. Little did I imagine then, that I would have the prospect of visiting its place of origin more than five decades later.