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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Other / 27.04.2015

Following a phone call and email exchange, I today heard from Annie Breslin, who has replaced Simon Smith as my curator at the National Film & Sound Archive, that they will take my collection of species videos. Steve and I will have to add taxonomic information to each opening title. Simon, who was a pleasure to deal with, had briefed Annie about my intention to provide data files of the vimeo videos.

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Other / 23.04.2015

Today Michelle Ryan and Greg Czechura of the Queensland Museum visited me as arranged last month, to check out the scope of my image library with a view to accepting it as a donation to the Museum. Greg has identified frogs for me over the years, so it was good to put a face to the name. They liked what they saw and we discussed data transfer requirements and the need for a formal deed of gift. I have undertaken to add taxonomic and location information to the written support material. It looks as if my image library has found a good home. The Museum is in the process of putting its huge image collection online in 2016.

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Film Diary / 15.04.2015

Thankfully Mark’s Easter school holiday ran to a second week and it was as if normal service had been resumed when we filmed in Palm Grove. The air was still and mild. The exceptional haul was found within 500 metres of the park entrance, starting with a beautiful green beetle, followed by a flat worm (only the third I have filmed), a Sooty Owl (the first, a rare find) and the largest Stick Insect I have filmed at night. PS The Sooty Owl turned out to be an also rare Marbled Frogmouth which I had not seen or filmed before.

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Other / 10.04.2015

The inestimable Peter Hendry sometimes refers a tricky moth to a lepidopterist contact at the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). Following an exchange of emails he identified one moth and regarding another made the intriguing point that it was a well known species on the mountain and in Lamington National Park but had not been named. The first photo of the moth he identified showed tuft scales on the hind wings the like of which I hadn’t recalled seeing before. Once he received photos of the whole moth and a close up the head facing the camera, he was able to identify it. In so doing he made two fascinating points. One was that the scale tufts were much less evident in a long dead specimen in a collection than on a live moth and the other was that the species has been associated with mangroves overseas and he wondered where mine came from. Peter replied that there are mangroves in nearby rivers.

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Film Diary / 08.04.2015

This was our first night filming since the 4th of March and the one before that was on the 4th of February. I just cannot muster a crew now that Hugh is no longer available and Mark only during school holidays. The time when we filmed every week, weather permitting, is becoming a distant memory. But enough of regretting lost opportunities. Tonight Mark was on holiday. I filmed a number of moths and a tiny frog. The glow worms were more abundant than at any other time this season. After substantial rainfall over Easter I wondered whether there would be sufficient water in the pool below the bridge over Sandy Creek for us to see the eel. No sooner had I expressed the hope than Mark caught sight of it. It didn’t like the spotlight and stayed under the bridge.

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Other / 10.03.2015

Today I received a phone call from Michelle Ryan of the Queensland Museum to arrange a meeting at my place next month to discuss my offer to donate my image library to the museum. I have received so much help over the years from a number of its curators identifying fauna, that wishing to give something back, I made the offer to Michelle a few weeks ago. At today’s count there are 3,530 video frames and 346 PANCAM photos in my image library. Locating it at the Queensland Museum would mean that all the elements of my work would be properly conserved, a most gratifying outcome.