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 / 03.02.2016

The five latest videos Steve and I finished uploading today bring the total to just over 375. Among them is the ‘Ringtail Possum’ resulting from the Showrunner email (see 72 Cutest Animals below). We passed the 350 mark nine months ago. The reason it has taken so long to add the 25 plus to reach the newest milestone is that Steve and I have been busy re-titling the videos so that they can be included in my National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) footage. We went from 300 to 350 in the space of a little over 3 months. After sorting out anomalies we have 215 HD videos ready to be delivered to the NFSA once Steve has sourced a hard drive and loaded it with data files. Lately we have been working our way through the SD videos, of which we have re-titled 50 or so.

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Other / 30.01.2016

Two days ago I received a vimeo message from Showrunner Productions in Perth asking permission to use my Brushtail Possum footage for ’72 Cutest Animals’ a follow-up series to their 2014 ’72 Dangerous Animals Australia’ which included footage by me. That series has been airing on Foxtel for the past year and a half, my contribution being “really appreciated”. I won’t repeat the mistake of last time in falling for Showrunner’s no budget, but being credited for my material ploy while actually incurring costs to provide uncompressed footage for the programme. I have two possum videos on vimeo, one featuring mothers and young. The request fortuitously reminded me of having filmed a Ringtail Possum three years ago feeding on leaves that, for reasons now completely beyond my fathoming, I had not made into a species video. Today, on the way to shot-selecting the possum footage, I found material for four more videos on the same tape. The one video I had selected from the tape was from footage which ended around the 19 minute mark and was the last of the HD Species Videos 2. We uploaded it to vimeo in December 2014. In starting HD Species Videos 3, I… Read Complete Text

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My Travels / 25.01.2016

When I popped into the local travel agent’s late last week to book my Brisbane-London return flights, I was aghast at the price – $3,459 Australian, particularly after having just heard a news item about the low cost of air travel due to the fall in the price of oil and a reluctance of people to fly to potential terrorist target locations. Today, I amended my booking to take advantage of the cheaper price of returning to Brisbane from Frankfurt and a considerable saving resulting from departing Singapore at 6.55 am instead of 9.40, which combined to reduce the fare by $900.

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Film Diary / 13.01.2016

We have been night filming four weeks out of a possible five. Last week it rained in the rainforest, but we were almost done and I could protect the camera. This evening in Palm Grove was the warmest of the season. I was accompanied by Mark, Dan and Michael. Just outside the entrance I filmed my second Goliath Stick Insect years after filming my first. It was in a tree a few metres overhead. Just inside the park I filmed a rodent called-up by Mark. Next was a large caterpillar and then a pair of amorous skinks. My filming culminated in a sight none of us had ever seen –  trapdoor spiders whose burrows, above head height, were in a sapling next to the path, instead of in the earth. I also started on my 100th tape.

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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.