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 includes photos as well as video frames because it contains the blog’s biodiversity content. It is also the blog’s second biggest category, after Other. The video content dates from 2008 to 2021, when I ceased videoing. The photographs date from 2014 to the present.

 

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 / 15.03.2025

The cyclone hovered out at sea and made a slow progress to the coast, which it crossed as a category one system just north of Brisbane. The delay allowed people more time to prepare. I bought two lights and a box of six candles at the hardware store. One of the lights has a magnet. I also bought some tins of food at the supermarket behind my unit block. The wind and rain picked up on the 5th, but neither had the intensity of any of the previous tropical lows or ex-cyclones. I had fish and a steak in the fridge. As long as I had power, I opted to have lunch rather than dinner and cooked the fish on the sixth. The wind and rain were more constant, but nowhere near cyclonic. On the seventh I had steak for lunch and did a complete washing up, relieved that we still had power. Just as well that I did, because at 3.15 pm the outage began.

The cyclone was now close to crossing the coast and the weather deteriorated accordingly. On the 8th the rain was constant and lashed by increasingly ferocious wind. I made good use of… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 15.03.2025

Looking out of my spare bedroom window, I was drawn to a sinuous shape on next door’s roof. I realised it was a snake sunning itself and grabbed my camera. The snake lifted its head and cast around to better acquaint itself with its location. I steadied my arm on the window ledge and held my hand to the glass as I zoomed in on the snake, from a distance of some eight metres. The shots revealed a green tree snake. It was quite a large specimen, perhaps 1m 80cm long. After a while it withdrew under the roof where it may have taken refuge to get out of the way of the wind and rain of the cyclone.

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Film Diary / 20.02.2025

On the 17th, I photographed a Yuuca which I had previously seen on my walk. I took up to ten shots, but when I tried to upload them to my laptop, a ‘no data’ message repeatedly appeared on my camera monitor. Somehow, I was able to upload two of the shots, but either the data card or the camera needed replacing. Yesterday I bought a new card and this morning, on my walk, I photographed the plant. In the intervening days it had lost most of its flowers. Crucially all the photos were uploaded to my laptop and I could view them as I took them, which was impossible with the fault. You can imagine how relieved I was not to have to buy a new camera. I kept four of the nine shots I took today. This is the first plant I have added to the ‘Other Flora’ album in nearly two years. I sent the trailer of the archive to a prominent botanist who criticized my project because the flora content was not confined to native species. However, my remit on the mountain’s biodiversity is to include everything that freely grows or moves.

 

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Film Diary / 11.02.2025

Robyn Law reminded me of a pair of brown gerygone nests she had seen, hanging from a shrub next to a footbridge over a tributary of Plunkett Creek. I drove there this morning to photograph them. The branch was below the walk way, which restricted the angle to an overhead shot. I could not get a photo showing both nests, but had to settle for a picture of each separately. I also had to wait for the breeze which caused the nests to sway incessantly, to die down sufficiently to allow a decent shot. I only saved five out of seventeen photos.

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Website / 03.02.2025

Yesterday I received an email from Melbourne IT about my domain name renewal which is due by May 1. It was the first in a series of monthly ’reminder’ emails. It emphasised that I check my eligibility to renew the name. This terrified me, because I was told the current name, unlike the one it replaced, did not require an active Australian Business Number. The first person I spoke to this morning said he would call back in an hour or two to confirm my eligibility. I phoned again in the afternoon and was told that I was eligible to renew the name. Previously I would renew the name for two years. Because of the change, I only registered the name for a year. I will revert to the two year renewal nearer the time.

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Website / 09.01.2025

The website gremlin saga was becoming a tad self-indulgent. I hadn’t heard from Jackie for a month. Her last email assured me that the matter would be fixed before Christmas. Today, after returning from the coast having driven through a cloudburst for twenty five minutes from a liquor store to a shopping centre, I uploaded a photo taken the previous day, and checking how it looked on the web page, I had to do a double take because the text accompanying the enlargement had been restored to the status quo. I emailed Jackie to let her know, saying that her actions spoke louder than the words I never heard from her and that it is demoralising when one’s website isn’t working properly. I had emailed Jackie on January 7, telling her that on the 10th I was due to pay my credit card for the plugin upgrade and that I had nothing to show for the expense. In my long experience of dealing with them, web builders are lousy communicators and do not look after their customers in the way most service providers do.