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 / 18.02.2013

During the past few days I have been able to confirm that Ben’s website set-up also extends to quick, operator-friendly generation of XML files for EOL. After having my computer serviced last week, I found that I could not create an underline space needed for 2 of the XML boxes. After a flurry of emails, the person who serviced my computer guided me to a solution. Today I sent 67 new files to EOL, the first in over 2 years.

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Film Diary / 13.02.2013

Tonight was our 80th shoot. It did not disappoint. Though I normally don’t film fungi at night, I filmed one with a large, dark grey cap, a cluster of 3 enormous Giant Panda Snails feasting on some orange fungi, a roosting Large-billed Scrubwren and a beetle. Note that on the previous week’s shoot we were joined by Jaap who is spending a couple of weeks in Canungra before resuming his bus travels around Australia. It was great seeing him again.

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Website / 09.02.2013

I accepted Henry Hardy’s quote for additional work on the website.

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Other / 06.02.2013

Sent the latest in an email exchange initiated by Kat Sawyer receiving a reply from Additions, a new gallery in Brisbane, to a query she made last October about staging an exhibition of her Vanessa’s and my work. I first heard about it via a phone call from Vanessa when I was driving home from the coast on the 16th of last month. We were intially offered a time in April, but agreed that we would prefer a date in October. Kat is presently under work pressure and Vanessa suggested that we try and meet over dinner to which I agreed, while pointing out our need to be productive when we do meet.

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Other / 29.01.2013

Between 25 and 29 January it was the Gold Coast hinterland’s turn to host ex-tropical cyclone Oswald. In my 26 years on the mountain I have never seen it so bashed up by the elements. This time it was the trees which were broken or uprooted everywhere. Property damage appears to have been restricted compared to the hailstorm on 16 November 2008, which resulted in hundreds of houses needing new roofs. Parts of the mountain had over 800 mm of rain. I was without power for 3 days, some poor people for 5 days or more.

Hard to fathom how a category 1 cyclone (the most severe is category 5) which formed in the Gulf of Carpentaria 1,600 km from here, could have been so destructive for so long, with record inundation further north only 2 years after once in a century floods, having tracked down the east coast before losing some of its intensity and petering out in NSW.

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Other / 14.01.2013

I delivered the report on our RADF grant project at my local Council offices. We had to wait for additional information from the grant giver and were cleared to meet today’s new deadline which we nearly missed due to having to abandon the optional audit, causing me to include a refund cheque.