Today Steve and I uploaded the last 5 videos bringing the total to 111. The project flagged 100+ videos. The average running time is 2 minutes. There are now 198 videos on my page.
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.
Today Steve and I uploaded the last 5 videos bringing the total to 111. The project flagged 100+ videos. The average running time is 2 minutes. There are now 198 videos on my page.
Exactly 15 years ago to the day, filming started on this biodiversity video project. Wildlife camera man and filmmaker Glen Threlfo had helped select my camera, a Canon XL1, which served me until 2007. The project began as a documentary, the seeds of which were sown as ’Island in the Sky’, a Friends of Tamborine Mountain initiative to capture the interaction between the mountain’s residents and its flora and fauna. The camera man was the son of a friend of mine who was keen on videoing. The first entries in the Film Diary, dated 19 January 1998, were of sunrise over the ocean and illuminating the ranges to the west. My son Simon, then 17, filmed some early night sequences. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of making a documentary because I felt totally out of my depth. I needed to devise a project over which I had as much control as possible. The concept of creating a video archive devoted to the mountain’s biodiversity came to me. It proved to be the ideal solution.
This evening Steve and I finalised the sound and completed corrections to the remaining RADF funded videos. On 7 December Steve and I uploaded the first 25 HD videos before reaching our capacity limit on vimeo. Hopefully Steve will be able to upload the remaining 22 videos ahead of the 15 December completion date for the project. Most of the HD videos are of fauna.
Steve and I completed uploading 9 new videos, the last of 64 SD clips funded by the Regional Art Development Fund grant. Most of the recent subjects have been flora and fungi.
India and Myanmar 3 – 18 November Reader be warned, I have sought to do justice to my subject. This article contains more than 6,700 words.
INDIA
I couldn’t contemplate a visit to Myanmar without going to India to catch up with family and friends. Usually this has meant staying in Gurgaon with my former in-laws with whom I have maintained a loving relationship. The fact that Kolkata is the city in India from which one flies to Yangon provided an unmissable opportunity for me to spend time with family friends I had last seen more than 30 years ago.
Sightseeing in Delhi
The day before my flight to Kolkata I booked Rajendra, the trusted driver whom the family hires for longer journeys, to take me to some outlying tombs and ruins which I had not seen on previous visits to Delhi. I urgently needed to buy more rupees. Rajendra pulled up at a money changer’s in a busy street en route to our first destination, Haus Khaz. A short external staircase led to a dingy room in which sat a shifty-looking man behind a counter. A board, listing various currencies but no rates,… Read Complete Text
This evening we went to Joalah National Park for the first time this season. It was on the cool side after the first rain in weeks. There were plenty of native cockroaches, some millipedes, a female Harvestman, a dragonfly, spiders and a snail. We saw two eels in the pool below Curtis Falls, one moderately sized, the other small. None of which I filmed. The highlight was filming a large Carpet Python partly stretched out on and partly coiled around, a bit of tree some 60cm off the ground. I also filmed a butterfly resting on a leaf.