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, Other / 13.05.2016

I was thrilled and touched to receive a hand-written letter from David Attenborough thanking me for the photos of the Log Cabin Case Moth and the letter about finding it that I sent him. He wrote that he had never seen the dewlling of a Log Cabin Case Moth before and that he found it fascinating.

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Other / 10.05.2016

My February 8 post was about walking past a cycad growing next to the footpath for years and years after I first filmed it and not noticing the white beech tree that had all but smothered it. Jaap alerted Land Care who liaised with Council to do the work. On today’s walk I was overjoyed to see the cycad unencumbered once again. The tree stumps remain as a reminder of the intruder. Removing them may endanger the cycad.

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Film Diary / 04.05.2016

Our 132nd night filming walk was at The Knoll. Fortunately it has been easier to muster a crew in 2016, thanks to Robyn and Jaap and the reliability of two recent recruits, Michael and Lumart. Although we are approaching the end of the season, the weather was mild, resulting in a rich haul of subjects, some not previously encountered. I filmed a native cockroach whose appearance reminded me of an over-sized wood louse. Next was a spider tending her egg sac. Thereafter a moth I don’t think I have previously filmed or photographed and the partly emerged chrysalis of a Swift Moth protruding from the compacted earth of the path, near its edge, a subject I had never even previously seen. Apparently disturbed by being filmed and photographed, the chrysalis withdrew into the ground with only its tip protruding and an antennae twitching.This season we have seen a more than doubling of our roosting bird record to tonight’s eight. As long as the weather stays mild, we shall endeavour to keep filming at night.

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Other / 29.04.2016

Following an earlier email to Dave Allen, the IT guru at the State Library, about Steve and I supplying data files for an additional 20 tapes of unedited footage as per the Deed of Gift, my follow-up email elcited an immediate response. Dave still has the hard drive onto which Steve copies the files and he has emailed us about dropping the hard drive off so that Steve can get to work on them.

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Other / 26.04.2016

I renewed my domain names for two years today. I started to renew online until I saw the price which was more than double the cost two years ago. So I phoned Melbourne IT and renewed at the old price which is probably extortionate.

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Other / 20.04.2016

The official receipt from the NFSA for the 215 species videos arrived today. A week ago I received a scary email from the curator who thought we had only sent 146 movies until she double-checked the USBs and confirmed that there were 73 movies on one  USB and 142 movies on the other.