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 / 02.03.2017

Today I posted the USBs with the 123 SD and 48 HD species videos to the NFSA. On Tuesday Steve and I put the finishing touches to the videos. Steve had to find the three missing SD videos, which he did. I discovered a taxonomic error in an old SD video which we had to re-title and render. Five HD videos were missing from Steve’s excel sheet and had to be found, which they were, and the last video required the taxonomic information to be added to the opening title. Then Steve had to copy the videos and excel sheets onto the USBs, which was done overnight so that I could collect them on Wednesday.

Logo

Other / 23.02.2017

Steve emailed me an excel for the remaining HD videos which we will include with the SD videos. When completed, we will be able to provide the NFSA with a fully up to date collection of species videos, including four we uploaded in January. We will produce the next videos from material on a memory card from the new camera. Based on the vimeo record, I discovered that three videos were missing from Steve’s SD excel list, bringing the total to 123.

Logo

Film Diary / 22.02.2017

This evening we concluded our night filming walk in The Knoll National Park, begun last week, when there were so many interesting subjects (two moths, two spiders, a butterfly and a beetle) that we barely got past the second bend in the path.

The big attraction at The Knoll is Hadronyche formidabilis, which resides in a tree next to the creek close to the furthest point of our walk. This spider has the most potent arachnid venom on the planet.  By tickling the trip lines with a twig, Mark causes the spider to leave its web thinking it is about to pounce on prey instead of the end of vegetable matter. This was the fourth occasion I have filmed the spider and this time I set myself up to get frame-filling close ups. The spider gave a bravura performance, leaving its web several times and hanging on to the twig in full view. On one take, its grip was so powerful that when it retreated into its web carrying the twig with it, Mark had to wait quite a while before it let go. For the record, this is post 450.

Logo

Other / 14.02.2017

This evening Steve gave me the Excel document for the SD Species Videos we will be sending to the NFSA (National Sound & Film Archive). It is about a year ago since we sent them the HD videos. Once I get into the swing of things it should be plain sailing. There are 120 videos for which I need to provide taxonomic and descriptive information. Among them are some of my earliest videos on Vimeo uploaded six years ago.

Logo

My Travels, Other / 11.02.2017

I have long thought I arrived in Australia at the end of February thirty years ago, but couldn’t remember the date. Wanting to mark the occasion here, I ferreted around to see what I could find and came across an old UK passport which unfortunately replaced the one I arrived with, the following year.

Happily, my old metal document case yielded the key paperwork relating to my move, including the Qantas ticket for my flight from Heathrow to the Gold Coast. I landed at Sydney on February 11. I remember over-nighting at the airport hotel, scarcely believing I was actually in Australia and only a relatively short distance and a matter of hours away from folding Simon, my beloved five year old son, in my arms. He had preceded me to Australia with his mother and her partner nearly a year before.

I was forty five years old when I came to Australia, straight from London to Tamborine Mountain, where I have lived ever since; my longest ever sojourn in the same place. Australia has been extremely good to me, allowing me to live a better life than I ever could in the UK, both materially and,… Read Complete Text

Logo

Other / 10.02.2017

This afternoon I posted a USB to Queensland Museum containing the 2016 video frames and photos to be added to my Image Library, plus supporting information on locations and species identification. There are 419 video frames. I tried to count the photos and arrived at a total of 559, making 978 images in all. However, in copying the photos to the USB there seemed to be many more items. I do not know whether that tally included the folders housing the jpgs.