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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Website / 30.09.2014

The updated XML files we sent before my overseas trip were all successfully harvested and are on my EOL gallery, BUT they replaced the  existing material. I should have known better than not to include the existing files with the new ones, especially after Andrew asked me if he had sent everything, meaning everything. Anyway, today we have sent the files to EOL and I await news of their successful harvesting.

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My Travels / 14.09.2014

I was away from 7 August to 14 September. The UK comprised Somerset and London with a day trip to York and Europe comprised Austria and Germany. I was about to start on Germany when I inadvertantly deleted everything I wrote on Somerset and Austria which had taken me several days. No save window appeared. It seems that somehow I had over-ridden the entire document, of which my UK/Europe post was part. This has not happened to me before. I simply don’t have the will or the time to try and replicate what I wrote. Suffice to say that I had a most enjoyable stay with Clive in Somerset and with Herbert & Gil Distel in Katzelsdorf.

What had been a splendid Summer in England and Austria had vanished without trace in August so that my time in both countries involved successfully dodging the rain (it was felicitous how often rain coincided with meals, stopping once we had finished eating) and having to contend with unseasonal cold.

On my first afternoon in Somerset we went shopping in Taunton where I found yellow cotton dusters edged with red stitching, the first item on my shopping list, and a… Read Complete Text

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Other / 28.07.2014

Nearly two years after I handed over the grant-funded data files of my unedited footage to the State Library, and nine months since I at last received the Deed of Gift duly signed by a library official, I today delivered the data files and DVDs of  HD tapes 67-80 funded by me. This means that the library now has the complete footage. I put down my reduced yearly output to a combination of creating 111 species videos, website travails, time away from home on trips and the fact that I was without my camera for 3 months last Summer.

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Film Diary / 25.07.2014

The potentially new semi-slug I filmed on our 100th night shoot (see 15 May) was confirmed in John Stanisic’s email today as Cucullarion parkini. This is the species he discovered in the Knoll in 1998, which is known to exist only on Tamborine Mountain and nowhere else on earth. It was my 3rd and best sighting. The first was in November 2011. All my sightings have been in Palm Grove.

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Website / 16.07.2014

For some weird reason when we added over 100 new XMLs to EOL, all but a few of the original XMLs vanished from my EOL gallery as if they had never been there at all, even though Andrew sought to make them compatible with WordPress.  All the new XMLs were successfully uploaded. After waiting a couple of weeks for Andrew to work on my corrections to the original XMLs, I decided to take matters into my own hands and re-do the lot from scratch. I then added over 100 new data files, which had been accumulating since the first new batch. All this took several days of long and concentrated effort. Andrew came to my place this morning and transferred all the XMLs from my downloads to his USB. He has some code checking to do before arranging for the XMLs to be harvested by EOL. As noted in my  8 May  post, we’ll see. Check EXPANDED PRESENCE ON EOL  30 March 2014.

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Other / 06.07.2014

Worked with Steve on new tapes and he confirmed that he had sent the final data file to Showrunner Productions in Perth, following succesive email requests to use my footage for their  ’72 Dangerous Animals Australia’  series to be shown by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Showrunner requested my ‘Giant Centipede’,  ‘Paralysis Tick’,  ‘Stephen’s Banded Snake’  and  ‘Grey-headed Flying Foxes’  vimeo footage.