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.

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Website / 07.05.2024

Today, my IT expert, backed up biodiversity.com.au and transferred it to speciesdiversity.au, with the help of a digital expert from Melbourne IT, whom he phoned. The backup was successful, save for two vital functions which were missing. The Album main page was present, but clicking on any of the thumbnails, resulted in a blank screen with the text: Not a valid template. The species search function produced a text: This form is not secure. Autofill has been turned off. Everything else on the site had been transferred and worked properly. All the album images and texts existed on the admin site. I also paid Melbourne IT to host the site.

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Website / 01.05.2024

Every two years, Melbourne IT send me reminders about the renewal of my domain name on the 17th of May. When I phoned to renew the name this morning, I was told that biodiversity.com.au would expire on the renewal date because I no longer had an Australian Business Number, something my accountant confirmed when I phoned him shortly after. You can imagine how shattered I was, fearing that my website, evidence of my life-affirming activity for 27 years, would vanish into thin air, leaving me with a huge, impossible to fill, void. Then, I dug my heels in, determined to keep my online presence alive. I discussed domain names which didn’t require an ABN and asked if speciesdiversity.au was available. On 2.5.24, I bought the name.

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My Travels / 29.04.2024

Thank god I have progressed my travel plans. This morning I paid Gina for the flights, which were all still available. So now it’s full steam ahead.

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Other / 26.04.2024

Today, during an hourlong operation, the urologist removed the kidney stone from my bladder, using a laser to zap the stone. This was the first time I have had a general anaesthetic and the first time since my birth that I have spent a night in hospital.  In fact, I spent another night and was collected by Steve and Paulina on 28.4.24 who drove me home. I treated them to a roast lunch at Bungunyah.

PS By 3.5.24, the tenderness and bleeding had stopped and I was well on the way to recovery. The urologist booked me for a de-brief on 27.5.24.

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Film Diary / 19.04.2024

The moment I saw the moth under the eaves of the garage wall in Central Avenue, I knew it was a species I had never seen. I needed my stepladder to photograph it. Miraculously, when I returned today, it had shifted its position to a better angle for the camera. The species has an interesting distribution, being found in southern Africa, Asia and widely in the Pacific islands, including New Caledonia, Fiji and central Polynesia. In Australia the species occurs in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia. Wingspan is 4 cm.

 

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Other / 02.04.2024

This afternoon I saw the urologist. His surgery was as busy as a railway station waiting room. He showed me a photo of the stone which he described as large and told me that I would need a general anaesthetic and be kept in overnight. I chose to have the operation at the Pindara Private Hospital and spent time with the doctor’s administrator dealing with the paperwork. I ended up hand-delivering the forms at the hospital on April 4.