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 / 12.01.2012

Received 2 emails from Vanessa confirming that our EOI for the public art project at the Queensland Museum had been submitted and receipt acknowledged. It was a lot of fun working on the submission which reflected a genuine pooling of ideas by Vanessa, Kat and me. The EOI had to be about our intentions and approach, rather than about our idea, which I think has a lot going for it. Only Vanessa has what one might call a profile in public art but it is not really established. I’m ever hopeful, but I am not holding my breath, as they say here.

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Film Diary / 10.01.2012

Mark and I went filming in Witches Falls National Park on our quest for finding Harvestmen in daylight. I filmed a rather good fungus, a Donuca rubropicta moth for the first time in rainforest, a pretty red Shield Bug, another moth which was on a rock and so beautifully disguised that I thought it was part of the lichen on which it was resting, and male and female Harvestmen. We first saw a male here on a night shoot in February 2011.

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Other / 10.01.2012

This evening Steve filmed my introduction to the DVDs at the same location we used before, the last house Jaap lived in on the mountain, which adjoins a rainforest creek. He was pleased with the result. A week ago he was on the mountain and recorded 2 hours of soundtrack of the rainforest at night. He had to put up with a truck or two, climbing the steep road which is on the boundary of one national park and with a passenger jet bound for Brisbane flying over another, but declared the sound quality good and clear.

 

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Other / 05.01.2012

Received an email with John Caddy's flight information regarding his forthcoming week's stay with me at the end of the month. John and I only know oneanother via the internet and I regard him as a good friend. So I am looking forward to meeting him in person and sharing as much of our biodiversity as we can encounter. Other than Clive and Christina, John, who hails from Minnesota, is the only friend who has undertaken to visit me in the nearly 25 years that I have been in Australia so I'm extremely grateful to him.

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Film Diary / 28.12.2011

For our last night shoot of 2011 we went to the Knoll. I filmed an ethereal looking katydid or grasshopper, a sweet, diminutive roosting bird on the end of a branch above the path and a female Harvestman, which, being smaller and duller in colour, is more difficult to film than the male.

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Other / 27.12.2011

This evening Steve added the final bit of narration (which required 6 sessions in the sound suite) to the remaining rainforest at night vision, so we now have the bulk of the content of our next 3 archive DVDs. We still need to do some deletions, dissolves and incorporate interview footage of Jaap, Mark and me, plus a yet to be filmed re-record of my introduction. And I need to do the wording for the slick and commission its design.