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.

Logo

Other / 28.04.2014

Following our telephone conversation last week, I emailed Simon Smith of the National Film and Sound Archive today, summarising our discussion regarding providing data files of our Vimeo uploads for the 5 ½ years to the end of 2014. The NFSA has all my edited and scripted content.  The vimeo footage is edited for visuals and sound. Much of the material will be new to the NFSA. I currently have 203 videos on Vimeo and have compiled an additional  14 which Steve and I will be working on next week and beyond.

Logo

Other / 28.04.2014

An email from Chris Taylor, who is based at Curtin University in Perth, arrived which confirmed that a frame I sent him yesterday was of a different Harvestman to the one he identified a couple of years ago. I filmed it in October 2013. He was only able to identify the family and pointed out that the group is long overdue a revision.

Logo

Other / 25.04.2014

As flagged in my 8 April post, Steve and I completed work on Hugh’s video frames. So today I sent out the newsletter informing subscribers that the frames had been added to the  AERIAL 2001  album. The views tend to focus on the escarpment with its gorges and shelf land, rather than on the plateau which are the main focus of Hugh’s aerial photos.

Logo

Film Diary / 23.04.2014

A stranger, who turned out to be a delightful man in his late eighties, phoned me today alerting me about Rose Robins attracted to a tree outside his bedroom window. Seeing as many as 4 or 5 at a time was new to him, since one usually sees a solitary bird. I timed my visit for late afternoon and was rewarded with a lone female who posed in full view instead of flitting about. Years ago I was taken by surprise by a Rose Robin at my favourite bird bath. It didn’t hang around long enough for me to get clear footage.

 

Logo

Other / 22.04.2014

I have received emails from Melbourne IT reminding me to renew my domain names, starting 3 months out from the 17 May expiry date. I tried to renew them on line today, only to discover that the charge for each domain was $146, $6 more than I paid for both last time. I resorted to phoning and the upshot was that I renewed the domain names for $140 until 17 May 2016.

 

Logo

Other / 08.04.2014

Today I sent out a newsletter announcing a new album called  AERIAL 2001, the first since the launch of my revised website. I am an aerial photo freak. I just love the vantage point. The initial images are photos by Hugh Alexander. I intend to add Hugh’s video frames in due course. I advise using the Album in conjunction with the maps on the Tamborine Mountain Page.