For a combination of reasons, among which was un-Spring-like weather, we did not start our night filming season until the 14th of November last year. Happily Spring has carried on from the warm and sunny August, the first in years, so we enjoyed our first night shoot of the new season. And we were richly rewarded by the abundance of possums in MacDonald National Park, which had been worst hit of all the parks by ex cyclone Oswald and had taken months to reopen. We saw Ring-tail Possums at the park entrance. The first creature I filmed was another Brown Huntsman, but Dan, who is a spider expert, pointed out that its distinctive banding indicated that it had just moulted. Then, I filmed a female Short-eared Brushtail Possum, close to the path and beautifully placed for the camera, with a youngster in its pouch. Deep into the park, we came across another Short-eared, this one with its young on its back, again, beautifully positioned for filming. Finally, close to the end of the circuit, Dan saw a rodent at the junction of the base of a tree trunk and its ground roots, with nowhere to go, allowing me to… Read Complete Text
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.