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 / 06.04.2016

Today I posted 2 USB sticks containing 215 HD Species Videos plus an excel folder with taxonomic and descriptive information plus the year each video was uploaded to Vimeo, to the National Film and Sound Archive in Sydney. The videos had to be retitled to include species and family names. a process we began in May 2015.

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Other / 01.04.2016

Today I handed over the latest instalment of the image library to Michelle Ryan of the Queensland Museum. She is drafting a new agreement based on the one I entered into with the State Library. There are 367 new video frames and 131 new photos. For the statiscally-minded, this is my 400th post.

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Other / 31.03.2016

Today Steve and I uploaded six new videos, after we had to abandon work because of the major systems failure which came to light on March 1. The videos are based on recent tapes, whereas the inaccessible data includes older tapes and whatever comes to light as we start from scratch, retitling the SD videos for the NFSA.

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Film Diary / 30.03.2016

Night filming in The Knoll with Mark, Jaap and Dan was the first time I have used the camera since before handing it over for repair at the beginning of the month. We saw three roosting birds, which is more than on any other walk. I filmed a net-casting spider in a tree, above head height, the same as the first of three species I have filmed but this time gaining a clearer view of spider and net. Jaap photographed a leech which had been on Dan’s boot and some glowing fungi which Mark had found, very different to the green-glowing species we regularly see. These were much bigger with a pale white glow, the fungus in the foreground was on earth below a large, fallen trunk from which numerous other fungi were sprouting. Meanwhile, Mark, Dan and I walked on. Dan pointed out the web of Hadronyche formidabilis, the Northern Tree Funnelweb and arguably the planet’s deadliest spider, on a tree next to the track. Mark tickled the trip lines and eventually lured the spider to twice emerge from one of its funnels, events I caught on camera. On the way out I filmed beautiful red fruit in… Read Complete Text

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Other / 24.03.2016

Collected the camera from Dev’s office. He thought he needed some software to make the required adjustments to the back focus, but Steve found out from Sony in New Zealand that the software is not applicable for the model and will now contact a local camera repairer to see if he can solve the problem and at what cost. Meanwhile, the raided system’s register cannot identify the data contained on the hard drives because, unlike the drives, it was not part of the mirror image backup. Steve is trying to find software to overcome the impediment, but if not, we will have to load up the data anew to progressively carry out our scheduled work.

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My Travels / 21.03.2016

Got back from staying with Simon and Nicole (my son and daughter-in-law) in Longreach for a few days. They have just bought their first house which is spacious and welcoming. The evaporative air conditioning system is brilliant, keeping the house cool and fresh while allowing windows to remain open to benefit from any breezes. This post is mainly about natural history and the land. One feature which delighted me was the abundant bird life in their small garden. 

The birds are attracted to a feeder and a bath under the overhanging branches of a substantial tree. Crucially there is a small clump of bushes on the other side of the boundary fence providing shade and perches for all comers. Crested Pigeons and Yellow-throated Miners were the dominant species with a variety of smaller birds, including Diamond Doves and a Little Kingfisher.

Simon showed me a bottle tree sapling which Nicole had given him as a wedding anniversary present. While taken with the beauty of the thought behind the gift, I was thrown by the proportions of the leaves which made me doubt if it was a bottle tree at all, so unlike the narrow, tapering leaves of… Read Complete Text