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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Other / 15.10.2016

This morning I photographed the fence post on the top of which the dwelling of the Log Cabin Case Moth was placed after it had been plucked from the adjacent picket fence as per the FILM DIARY entry of 16 April this year. Just six months later the top of the post was concealed by the new growth of a shrub. I have just added a photo to the ‘Other Fauna’ album. In other words, only the three least revealing of the eighteen photos I took of one of my project’s most  fantastic subjects would have been possible, had I found the dwelling today.

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Film Diary / 12.10.2016

We started the new night filming season in The Knoll with walk 134. Jaap and Lumart were the crew. Although the night was cooler than we would have liked, we were expectant of some night life because the weather last week was warm. I can’t readily recall a more felicitous season opening. I filmed a weevil, a moulting spider, a moth, a damselfly, a mayfly and, wonder of wonders, the dwelling of a log cabin case moth larva – the last three on a stand of young palms. The dwelling had seven layers and lacked the extensions of the one I photographed in April this year, which had eleven layers. I never expected to see its like again, yet barely six months later one turns up at night in our beloved rainforest. We saw female and male harvestmen, some very large spider burrows, several moths, a semi-slug, two leaf-tailed geckos, some beautiful fungi and two huge giant water spiders.

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Other / 12.10.2016

Tonight I loaded what, as far as I know, is my final tape. Sony no longer produce the tapes because current cameras record onto data cards. I purchased 10 tapes in May last year to tide me over until I was in a position to buy a new camera. The tapes are still obtainable, but I am now ready to buy the camera. The pressure is on for me to source it. Steve and I have eyes on a Panasonic 4K camera which we would like to trial, but are waiting to get hold of one from Steve’s trusty supplier.

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Other / 09.10.2016

I attended the successful launch of Japp Vogel’s book of a selection of his beautiful photos of the mountain’s flora and fauna, “Green Island in the Sky”. It was at a winery on the mountain. Many of the nocturnal subjects were photographed on our night filming walks. Jaap was the original spotlighter and fulfills the role currently when Robyn is unavailable.

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Film Diary / 07.10.2016

For the second time this week I stopped to film three Masked Lapwing chicks on my way to the bower (see the post for 23 September). They were foraging in a small, unfenced orchard in my street. I had seen the parents for some time on a vacant block on the other side of the park in front of my home. The chicks were older than the ones I filmed in SD, which were being nestled by their mother. The chicks I filmed this week were very quick on their legs. Today I was able to get closer to them.

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Other / 02.10.2016

Years ago it was moths on a double garage I passed unseeingly on my morning walk. Today it was cotton plants growing in the front garden belonging to a lady long known to me whom I stopped to chat with, noticing a wooden box filled with cotton bolls which she and her partner had picked earlier this year from shrubs they planted four years ago. The shrubs had just been cut back, but I was told that when fruiting they grow well over a metre tall and fill out, so that it is a puzzle why I had never noticed their fluffy white presence. A bonus is that when in full leaf the shrubs are infested by jewel-like harlequin bugs. This post amounts to a timely and welcome corrective to my claim of looking out for the overlooked.