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.

Logo

Other / 05.11.2012

Prince Charles and Camilla visited Longreach today on their trip to Australia and New Zealand marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and popped into the Qantas Founders Museum.  Nicole sent an email confirming that she and Simon  met them and that she was thrilled and honoured to be chosen to present Prince Charles with a newly published biography of one of the Qantas founders. Bravo Nicole.

Logo

Website / 02.11.2012

Today Ben came to my place to give me a tutorial in operating the website. I am confident that he has created a quick, operator-friendly set-up as far as the gallery and blog are concerned. We didn’t have time to try out generating XML for EOL. In any case I was hard-pressed to absorb all the information on creating gallery pages and blog entries.

Logo

Film Diary / 29.10.2012

My camera’s 20x optical zoom is invaluable for revealing the appearance of a given subject. It works best if I am 90 cm or a metre away. But, some subjects, like the small and tiny moths I filmed on the garage today, can benefit from bringing the camera as close as possible to them. One of its features is the button which allows a zoom at a pre-set slow or fast speed, but which can also be pressed to give very gradual increments of proximity. I was able to get much better close ups of the moths this way than by being on full zoom.

Logo

Film Diary / 24.10.2012

For the first time I failed to film any subject on our fist night shoot of the season. Mark, Dan and I were in the Knoll NP. The shoot was already delayed because of a cool Spring and further delayed because I was in Longreach for the first half of October. But the generally cool nights persisted. Returning from Steve’s the night before, the external temperature read-out in my car was C13° and it was 14° before we started our walk tonight. The only times, twice from memory, when I failed to film on a night shoot was on the last walk of the season. Tonight we saw a rodent which didn’t hang around to be filmed, a Ring-tail Possum which was too far away, a small moth buffeted by the wind, a Brown Huntsman spider and in the car park just before leaving, we heard an unfamiliar sound and Dan shone his powerful torch on a Squirrel Glider climbing high up on the trunk of a Flooded gum tree and jumping onto branches in the canopy with incredible speed and agility. I was content just to have seen this glider for the first time ever.

Logo

My Travels / 16.10.2012

A week after Simon agreed the dates for me to visit him and Nicole in Longreach, I set off on the 1250km drive and  fell in love with the outback all over again. My stay coincided with the last days of the tourism season, so all the local attractions were open. The Qantas Founders Museum is a fun place to visit and for that reason seems like a really good workplace. It was lovely at last being with Simon and Nicole for an extended period and seeing how much they were enjoying their married life in Longreach.

Unlike my first foray into the interior on a road trip with Simon 25 years ago, when I was new in the country, the ranges had good grass cover instead of being baked. On the journey I delighted in seeing Queensland Bottle Trees, some of wondrous girth, growing in paddocks or lining the streets of towns. Other than a number in Blackall, a faint echo of the magnificent avenues in Charleville, I did not notice them north of Auguthella. It was only well after Mitchell, where I broke my journey, that I saw my first wild emu in many years…. Read Complete Text

Logo

Other / 29.09.2012

Today I attended the private view at Boonah Regional Art Gallery of an exhibition of Jan Drynan’s paintings, an artist I have long admired. In addition to Jan’s main subject of landscape painting, the exhibition included paintings and prints of the anti Coal Seam Gas protest by farmers and environmentalists at a drilling site near her property. On the spur of the moment I decided to buy the painting I liked most of all, a superb Scenic Rim landscape.