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 / 21.08.2013

Gavin Bannerman and his colleague Zenovia Pappas duly kept their appointment at my place and we went through the associated papers which all refer to the SD footage. They departed with a document box of folders about ¾ full. The equivalent ‘paperwork’ for the HD footage, which the Library has already, is all digital. It remains for me to draft a statement covering the presentation of the interviews on their own. My concern is that should this happen, it must be clearly made known that the interviews are peripheral to a project devoted to biodiversity. Once the wording is agreed, I shall go to the library to sign the Deed of Gift.

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Other / 20.08.2013

Steve uploaded  four more short grant-aided videos to Vimeo to add to the 8 he uploaded over the weekend. A week ago we finalised the sound for the first 25 tapes. I have shot-selected 61 SD videos and am waiting for identification on at least 3 more species. The 4 new videos bring my total on Vimeo to 103.

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Film Diary / 15.08.2013

What with the website still not finished and the 100+ flora and fauna videos to do, I have not filmed for 2 months. The yardman who looks after some shops near my home, showed me what I believe is a Striped Marsh Frog, hibernating under a stone. The first such frog I filmed was also hibernating. I returned with my camera. After a few minutes the frog twitched a few times before deciding it needed to find a better hiding place in some adjoining bracken.

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Other / 31.07.2013

After months of to-ing and fro-ing, an email arrived from Gavin Bannerman, curator at the State Library. It confirmed a meeting at my place to select associated papers, such as final scripts, interview transcripts and the like to be added to my donation of the unedited footage of the archive. This is essential so that the Deed of Gift, which lists what the donations consists of, can be completed.

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Not The Brisbane Line / 25.07.2013

An advantage of having a blog is the scope to push topics dear to the blogger. Such is the case with the ensuing paper, written in August 2004, chronicling in detail what communities challenging speculative development proposals in Queensland have to endure. Be warned, the paper contains over 6,000 words. The development was a proposed cable way to Tamborine Mountain from Willow Vale, an acreage community on lower ground west of the Pacific Highway and north east of Tamborine Mountain. The paper is in the form of a submission to the then Attorney General, Rod Welford MP. The Appendices which accompanied the paper are not included here. I was the paper’s instigator and lead author. Jean Campbell was a key committee member from Willow Vale. Mercifully, the cable way was not built.

SUBMISSION TO THE HON ROD WELFORD

Attorney General and Minister for Justice

THE NEED TO PROTECT COMMUNITIES AND INDIVIDUALS FROM MAJOR SPECULATIVE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

This submission is concerned with major speculative development proposals for which a formal planning application has not been lodged. As a preliminary to presenting a detailed case history of one such project, it is appropriate to make the following general… Read Complete Text

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Other / 18.07.2013

Nigel Fechner, a mycologist who has been helping me with identification for a number of years, sent me an email identifying 2 more fungi species for the 100+ videos, having already identified 3 species. I have been working apace through my SD footage. Of 57 shot selected videos, 11 are of fungi. I have shot selected a further 11 videos for which I need species identification, Nigel having obliged by identifying the 2 fungi on the list.