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 / 25.06.2015

It’s amazing what difference a bit of rain can make. Moths and fungi appear as if from nowhere, even in winter. I filmed both at the garage in Central Avenue, the first time I have filmed fungi there. They were small and grey, growing in a cluster through the gravel. It was good to get back behind the camera after my trip and given the winter slow down in activity.

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My Travels / 17.06.2015

I was away from June 4 to 17. The journey began before I left the flat when I somewhat apprehensively took the first of a daily course of malarone anti-malaria tablets, having read the possible side effects which included vomiting. Mercifully my concern was short lived. The pill caused no problems. As you might expect, I will be writing primarily about the fauna and flora. My rapture at seeing the creatures, the vegetation and the lie of the land was identical to the feeling I get when I’m filming a species for the first time or in a new setting here on the mountain. I suggest you google the species to which I refer so that you can at least see what they look like. A warning, this article contains over 9,900 words.

My travels introduced me to four planes I had not flown in before. The first was the Avro RJ85, no longer in production, but an impressive aircraft, which took me from Johannesburg to Maun in Botswana, the southern gateway to the Okavango Delta. From there I boarded the second ‘new’ plane, a single-engine 12 seat Cessna 208 which flew me above the tree tops on… Read Complete Text

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Website / 01.06.2015

Today I uploaded the 50th Gallery Page, more than doubling the number of pages since the website’s relaunch 21 months ago. I was premature in thinking I had finished writing up my image library because I forgot to include Hugh Alexander’s 118 aerial photos, bringing the total number of images to 4,149. Plus, I have just finished selecting some 220 frames from the four latest tapes for future capture. The work continues.

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Other / 20.05.2015

This evening I completed writing up species identification and location on the 3,597 video frames and 434 photos which comprise my image library as a preliminary to handing it over to the Queensland Museum. I started the work around the beginning of the month and have been at it with hardly a break. It helped that there were as many as nine repeat illustrations of a number of subjects and fewer repeats of many more. The work has added great value to the images and revealed errors which have been corrected and omissions which have now enriched my website. A Deed of Gift has to be finalised. That won’t happen until after my return from Africa, whither I am bound in just under a fortnight.

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Other / 05.05.2015

Last Friday I ordered new tapes from the local supplier, only to be told that there were none in stock, but further enquiries would be made. Today I was told that Sony was no longer making the tapes. I phoned the people in Sydney from whom I bought my camera and was directed to FATS (Film and Tape Sales) in Chatswood. They had 30 in stock and I promptly ordered 10 for delivery on Friday. I am looking to buy a new camera at the end of the year and hope the tapes will tide me over. Steve had foretold the demise of the tapes some time ago.

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Other / 01.05.2015

With the latest 8 videos Steve and I have uploaded to the site, the total has just ticked over the 350 mark. At the time we received a grant in 2013 to create videos, there was a substantial backlog of SD and HD footage. We are now up to date with 3 videos pending and 4 time-coded DVDs awaiting collection from which new clips will be selected.