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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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.

 

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Film Diary / 04.03.2015

Our 114th night filming walk was the first in exactly four weeks, thanks to a combination of rainy weather and the difficulty of finding a crew. Mark & Hugh are no longer regularly available and a new-comer cried off last week. Ideally I would like to film at night once a week during the season (from mid September to mid May).  This evening we returned to Palm Grove where I filmed a tiny snail on a palm leaf, a cage built by a moth larva in which it pupates and a pair of mating katydids. Valerie’s Austin Bug Collection website provides a succinct account of an act which appears to be quite secretive and which she has never seen. “The male transfers a large jelly-like mass called a spermatophore to the female. This has two parts: a small packet of sperm which is inserted into the female followed by a larger glob of nutritious gel, a nuptial gift that the female consumes to help with egg production.” For the statistically minded, this is my 350th post.

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Film Diary / 23.02.2015

As the media is fond of reporting, the Gold Coast and its hinterland dodged a bullet as ex-cyclone Marcia veered out to sea instead of continuing its overland deluge southwards. The more than 200 mm of rain that fell on the mountain in a little more than 2 days was but a vigorous glancing blow. Yesterday I collected the camera from Steve. He was able to capture the six tapes, the time-coded DVDs of which I hope to pick up later this week. We agreed that I should use my back-up camera for establishing shots. Today I filmed more butterflies and used the back-up camera to film wide shots of the flowering vine which attracts them. I also used it to reprise wide shots of a small flowering plant growing out of the trunk of a maple tree and to re-shoot a definitive garden shed.

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Other / 19.02.2015

A category 5 tropical cyclone is heading for the central Queensland coast, with torrential rain forecast for this part of the world later today and for the following 2 days. I therefore took my camera to Steve so that he can attempt to capture the 6 latest completed tapes. He needs to overcome the camera’s fire wire problem which has recently reappeared. Steve also confirmed that the auto focus is faulty and unable to deliver wide shots which was self-evident from recent footage. I need wide shots to define the setting of a visual story. The right side of the frame is sharp, the left side is soft. Closer and zoom shots are not affected, but the situation is not good. I am waiting to hear if fixing the fault would be almost as costly as buying a new camera. I don’t want to be minus the camera any longer than the duration of the bad weather, because I am making up for lost time when I was without the camera for 3 months last Summer. I am apprehensive that the weather may be a reprise of the ex-cyclone that devastated the mountain just over 2 years ago, inter alia plunging our… Read Complete Text

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My Travels / 10.02.2015

I have just got back from the travel agent’s after booking the flights for my 12 day African safari, departing Australia on June 4. I have never been to Africa but was minded to bring decades of footage of its big game to life, much as my Canadian rail journey in 1964, when we followed the shore of Lake Superior with its rafts of tree trunks, had done for my secondary school geography lessons. I shall be spending 5 nights in the Okavango Delta, 2 nights in Chobe National Park (both in Botswana) and 3 nights at a lodge on the Zambian side of Victoria falls.The allure of a huge inland delta was irresistible not only to me but to my travel agent. She took her teenage son and daughter on an identical safari during the recent Summer holidays and had an exhilarating time.