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 / 08.03.2016

A week ago my fortnightly evening with Steve had to be curtailed because two of the hard drives crashed, preventing us from accessing the files we needed for the work we were scheduled to do. Steve set about rebuilding the drives, which takes 30 hours or more. After the first rebuild the computer shut down and the process had to begin anew. Meanwhile Steve has acquired two replacement drives, only one of which he was able to install. I was supposed to be with him this evening, but this had to be postponed until Thursday (March 10). Meanwhile, last Thursday I took my camera to Steve’s office and met with Dev, one of his technicians, who is attempting to fix the problem which causes the right side of the frame to be out of focus on wide shots, the result of the camera falling onto an earth bank one night, a year ago. Fingers crossed for hard drives  and camera fixes.

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Not The Brisbane Line / 28.02.2016

This statement dates from 2003, although I feel the original version may have been written a few years earlier. It was prompted by my experience challenging the local government/developer nexus’s approval of a procession of inappropriate development applications on Tamborine Mountain in the 1990s. From memory it was circulated to environmental organisations and bureaucrats.

THE  ENVIRONMENT

1. It is the responsibility of this generation of Queensland’s opinion leaders and decision makers to secure the state’s exceptional biodiversity largely in its current form, for present and future generations. The concept of sustainable development is widely cited, but seems little understood. At heart is the question of deciding what is to be sustained, assuming that whatever it is, is sustainable. Following on from that, is the implied capacity to keep whatever this is, going indefinitely, as per my opening sentence.

2. The unpalatable reality for a political culture which has long espoused the mantra of development and growth, seen as a measure of their achievement by Queensland governments of both left and right, is that protecting the environment requires prohibiting development. By development I mean placing buildings and other infrastructure on the land. One would think that it is… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 24.02.2016

Our 125th night walk was on 10 February, but with little to film. We created the 3 ‘Rainforest at Night’ hour long DVDs after the first 53 walks. The following week there was nothing to film. Tonight, in MacDonald National Park, I filmed a splendid Stick Insect on a tree stump next to the path. It had a robust but not particularly long body and banded legs. Next I filmed a small frog, probably a Cascade Tree Frog, on a palm leaf. I manged to capture the glint in its eye. Finally I filmed some mating stick insects. The male looked to be no more than a nymph which possibly made the female a nymphomaniac.

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Other / 19.02.2016

Showrunner Productions are a no show for my possum clips. Perhaps my refusal to provide uncompressed material for free cooled their ardour. The good thing to emerge from their initial interest is that I was reminded about my Ringtail Possum footage which I had not made into a video, but have now.

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Other / 08.02.2016

A few days ago I told Jaap that he could photograph a cycad (an ancient and slow-growing palm or fern-like form of plant life) across the road from the Eagle Heights Post Office. I thought no more about it until I opened my eyes and saw, to my horror, that in the intervening sixteen years since I filmed its companion next to the footpath, a White Cedar tree had all but smothered this cycad. I had simply walked by day after day, year after year without registering the unwanted intrusion of a non-native on one of Australia’s glorious endemic flora species, Lepidozamia peroffskyana. It has the largest (reproductive) cones, about 1 metre long, of all the earth’s cycads.

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Film Diary / 03.02.2016

This evening I filmed in Palm Grove with Robyn, Michael and Jaap. Recent rain livened up the leeches. I was complaining that my companions were more concerned to remove leeches from their persons than find subjects for me to film. Palm Grove is notorious for leeches and we all had to pull them off legs, boots and clothing. But there was one highlight for me to film, namely five Mountain Semi-slugs (the species discovered on the mountain in 1998 and only known to exist there) on a single young palm next to the path. Not only did I film multiple specimens (two actually) for the first time in four sightings, I also filmed them in motion for the first time.