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.

 


 

Logo

Other / 20.11.2015

I collected the letter with the Queensland Museum Network Gift Agreement for my Image Library from my mail box (as opposed to my PO box). It is a rather flimsy affair compared with the State Library Deed of Gift and at first reading appears to vest copyright with the Museum. There are other issues I need to raise before signing.

Logo

Other / 20.11.2015

An email arrived from a television production company in Los Angeles requesting permission to use my Arachnophobia 2009 video of an aggregation of Golden Orb-weaving Spiders for a TV series for the Science Channel. All well and good. In July last year we provided Showrunner Productions in Perth footage from various videos for a series they were making for ABC TV here in Australia. To date there has been no sign of it and perhaps it always was a speculative project. Needless to say they balked at the idea of paying me. Will Karga 7 Pictures? These production companies are in business to make money but seem to rely on not having to pay the likes of me. Don’t get me wrong, it is always flattering to be asked.

Logo

Film Diary / 08.11.2015

There has been a marked shortage of moths at the garage this season. It could be due to a cool, dry Spring. I did photograph three moths a month ago, but no others until stormy weather set in a few days back and even then numbers were far fewer than after comparable rain periods. Today I photographed three moths and emailed images for Peter Hendry to identify.

Logo

Website / 29.10.2015

Have just sent Andrew a zip folder containing 149 XMLs. There were 151 species on my list, but only 149 XMLs. I was quietly going round the bend thinking I had missed a couple and asked Steve to make my list alphabetical when I worked with him two evenings ago. The original list was grouped according to subject and location in the Albums. There were 70 moths, of which two were duplicated. To complicate matters, I sent EOL an email regarding the Data Object GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) and the reply contained the frustrating information that EOL’s data harvesting system is severely malfunctioning and will take a while to rectify. Steve and I uploaded new videos to vimeo a month ago. My most recently harvested videos on EOL date back to 5 months ago, though we uploaded 3 videos to vimeo 3 months ago.

Logo

Website / 18.10.2015

After working through my albumsI I listed the final few new XMLs for the Encyclopaedia of Life (EOL), bringing the total number of taxa (species) to 148 since July 2014. The list is an essential pre-requisite for using the template created by Ben Sinclair from which the XMLs are generated with their taxonomic information, descriptive texts and links to relevant video frames and photos. Many of the species are already on my gallery pages at EOL as videos, but many will appear there for the first time. I generated all the new XMLs for birds and am waiting to hear if they are okay from site developer Andrew (only doing this once a year  gives scope for error). Based on the to-ing and fro-ing of past experience, it will be a while before the XMLs are safely lodged with EOL.

Logo

Other / 13.10.2015

This evening over dinner at Steve’s I was told that Taylah had achieved an A for her film and video work during the year. She shot two videos: the one featuring me being the second. Very gratifying to be involved in her excellent work. Congratulations and well done T.