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 / 24.10.2013

The Addition 6 exhibition opened this evening. Steve helped me set up yesterday afternoon and he and Paulina attended the opening which was a sterling effort. I thought that the standard was uniformly good. Vanessa and Kat’s work was excellent as was that of Ali Bezer and Lucas Davidson. There was a lively crowd of mostly young people and the weather was balmy. My work drew some appreciative comments. A modest occasion, but one I’m glad to have been involved with.

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Other / 21.10.2013

Gavin Bannerman, in response to my email this morning, sent me a pdf of the Deed of Gift this afternoon, duly signed by an official of the State Library of Queensland. The official signed the Deed on October 3, the day after my visit to the Library to sign the Deed and have it witnessed: see the October 2 post. The delay came from Gavin. The Accession Number is 29193.

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Film Diary / 11.10.2013

To make full sense of this post, you will need to read the previous post first. What a difference 2 days make. I recalled a daylight photo of a semi-slug my friend Louise Piper sent me which looked like Cucularion parkini. It was taken on her letterbox about 200 metres from one of the entrances to Palm Grove. I had lost the photo, so asked Louise to re-send it. Whereupon I emailed it to John. I got his reply this morning confirming it was none other than his 1998 discovery.  Louise’s photo predates my first encounter by 18 months, so we now have a new second sighting of a mollusc still apparently confined to the mountain.

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Film Diary / 09.10.2013

The latest email exchange with mollusc expert John Stanisic, who has identified the various snails I have filmed, concluded on a most interesting note this morning. I had sent him 3 nocturnal frames of Semi-slugs on September 27 to which I received a reply yesterday, confirming one identification and requesting further information on the other frames which he stated were both of the same species. I promptly replied, telling him that I had filmed the two in Palm Grove National Park, the first in November 2011, the second in March 2012. Whereat he quickly responded with the identification. He had momentarily forgotten that I only film on Tamborine Mountain. On googling the species, Cucularion parkini (Semi-slug 2 on page 2 of the Night Life album) I found out that it was discovered by John in The Knoll National Park on Tamborine Mountain and written up in 1998, the year I began my video biodiversity artwork. I then sent John a congratulatory email and asked if the mollusc had been found anywhere else since. Which brings us to this morning’s email in which John declared that our sightings were the only others recorded. A true, only on the mountain and nowhere… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 04.10.2013

It was third time lucky after filming was postponed from Wednesday to Thursday and then to Friday. Insects were to the fore in The Knoll National Park and little else, due to a strong, cool wind brought about by a change in the weather. First there were 3 moths on a leaf, two of them mating and oblivious to the effects of the breeze. Dan found a small insect with a greater ratio of body length to antennae length than any I recall filming. I ended up with surreal shots of disembodied antennae waving in vegetation. Amanda found a Net-casting Spider at a good angle for filming. The wind blew the net in and out of focus. Anxious to show Amanda one of our famous male Harvestmen we searched every inch of their rocky habitat to no avail. We did see a less spectacular female on the move and I filmed a Harvestman new to us which Dan found in our search. This was a fitting conclusion to our 90th night shoot of the series.

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Other / 02.10.2013

Today I went to the State Library to sign the Deed of Gift, thereby formally entrusting my archive to its care, and concluding negotiations dating back to 2005. The Deed needs to be signed by a senior Library executive. Once that is done, I will receive my copy of the document. I also handed over the releases signed by the interviewees and a revised script that had not been among the items taken away by Gavin Bannerman and Zenovia Pappas when they came to my place on the 21st of September.