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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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.

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

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Website / 30.03.2014

An email arrived from EOL with the link to my species data contributions in the form of video frames and  videos. On the 24th Andrew sent corrections to a few of the now nearly 240 XML species files to EOL. Thanks to the relaunched website this is more than double the number we originally submitted.

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Other / 16.03.2014

Today was another first in that Steve and I worked together as opposed to socializing, for the first time since December 19. We created 5 new videos and uploaded 4, which moves the total on my vimeo and web pages beyond 200.