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 / 09.01.2016

After Steve and then Jaap set up the spreadsheet listing the data files of the re-titled High Definition species videos for the National Film & Sound Archive, earlier in the week, I entered the last video on it today. There are 219 videos, though I could not identify one that Steve named and it unexpectedly transpired that another three had not been uploaded to vimeo. There were some technical issues with incomplete copying from vimeo to excel which Jaap has offered to work on next week. Also, I need to check with Steve that I have entered the correct information for the few videos with the same title which appear together in alphabetical order as here, though not when in date order as on vimeo and my website. This was my first spreadsheet.

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Website / 04.01.2016

Today I launched a new Album with the above title. Over the years friends have occasionally photographed me filming. And a while back I asked Hugh Alexander to photograph  members of the night filming crew. During the past two weeks I took some location pictures for the Album which I then assembled complete with captions. I shall post updates as new material is added. Please note: some of the images are portrait format for which the website is not really suited. A few of these will be replaced as soon as possible but it is not worth delaying the launch.

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Other / 31.12.2015

Although a map showing the world’s ant species was launched by the University of Hong Kong last August, I feel it is opportune to now bask in the reflected glory of Queensland being home to the highest number of native species, 1,458 out of approximately 15,000 globally. You can find out more at antmaps.org The diversity view makes fascinating studying. The UK has 62 native species, France 224.

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Film Diary / 30.12.2015

Tonight was our 120th walk, almost 8 years to the day since our first and a terrific way to finish 2015, the previous week having been rained off. Mark joined Michael,  Jaap and me in MacDonald National Park on a beautiful night, the slopes sheltered from the wind which was blowing in the car park. I filmed a Shiny-leaf Stinging Tree new to me, a spider which was probably a Brown Huntsman but looked different, a definitely different species of skink, a dead bandicoot infested with flies and maggots, a moulting cicada nymph and what looked like an unusual snail on a leaf. Rather an impressive haul.

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Film Diary / 16.12.2015

For the first time in 10 weeks I was able to muster a crew for night filming, namely Robyn and Michael,a student she recruited. Jaap was able to accompany us. We went to Joalah National Park and were rewarded with sightings of many of our regular species. I filmed a close relative of a pill millipede, new to us, which terminated in  a large, grey hind segment. I also filmed a small, black centipede and two small winged insects with white eyes, one black with orange spots, the other just black. It was sheer joy to be out on a beautiful night in our beloved rainforest once again.

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Film Diary / 12.12.2015

My FILM DIARY entry of 25 July 2015 proudly proclaimed my sighting of two new bird species on the same day, when sighting one is a rare occurrence. I did see two new species, but I got the identity of both wrong, one of them spectacularly so. I discovered the spectacular blemish a few days ago and the second error today. To set the record straight, what I identified as a Topknot Pigeon is the very different Feral Pigeon (whose ruffled feathers gave the appearance of a thick crest at the back of the head). The Feral is a domestic pigeon which has returned to the wild. What I identified as a Little Corella is the similar looking Long-billed Corella. Little Corellas are native to this part of the world whereas the presence of Long-billed Corellas here (they are endemic to southern Victoria and western New South Wales) is due to the release or escape of captive birds.