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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Film Diary / 09.11.2011

Night filming in the Knoll National Park with Mark and Dan. A good haul which included a male Harvestman, a Black-spotted Semi-slug, a Giant Water Spider and one of Australia's largest ant species, highlighted by a large Great Barred Frog with only one eye and a very docile Small-eyed Snake which fortunately for me, preferred the path to the undergrowth. This species is listed as venomous and dangerous.

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Film Diary / 04.11.2011

Following a phone call from Jenny Peat, I filmed 2 Grey Goshawk chicks and an adult, on their nest some 20 metres up in a tree. The adult left the chicks to their own devices and only put in two appearances in over two hours, one fleeting, the other allowing me to get some hopefully good footage. One or other or both of the chicks were visible the whole time.

 

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Not The Brisbane Line / 01.11.2011

The Tamborine Times treated my One small place on earth… contributions as a filler rather than as content. At best my video frames appeared weekly (while the publisher was on holiday), at other times fortnightly or worse, so I contacted the Tamborine Mountain News and offered my services to them. The Times appears weekly and contains more pages than the News, which appears every other week. But the News, run by volunteers, is about serving the community rather than seeking the last dollar and today my first piece, featuring a vine thicket, appeared in hopefully its new home.

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The Brisbane Line / 31.10.2011

Martin Leet emailed me confirming that my article ‘Biodiversity as Art’ was up on the Brisbane Institue site. I thank Martin for giving me the opportunity, which I greatly appreciate, of sharing my reflections on my 13 year biodiversity artwork and what it means to me.

BIODIVERSITY AS ART

It was my extreme good fortune to come straight from London to Tamborine Mountain in late February 1987. I was bowled over by the natural abundance and exuberance of the place – by the brilliant colours of the birds, the size and profuse growth of the vegetation, the exotic presence of bougainvillea and hibiscus and above all, by my first walk in the jungle, which is what rainforest used to be called. Then, after many years of environmental activism on land use issues, in 1998 I bought a Canon XL 1 digital video camera and started creating a video archive devoted to the mountain’s species rich biodiversity. I just did not want to run the risk of it succumbing without fitting trace, to the threat posed by development and population increase in Australia’s fastest growing and second most biodiverse region.

My preoccupation with biodiversity is informed by art,… Read Complete Text

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Other / 25.10.2011

The scripting continues apace and with it the species identification, with emails whizzing to and fro. Today John Caddy emailed me in reply to a frame I had sent him of a mosquito on a leaf at night informing me that the 'mosquito' was a Crane Fly. This necessitates not only a script rewrite, but a script re-record. Just when I thought I had got off lightly after my friend and naturalist Doug White confirmed yesterday, that what we thought were Bush Rats were all Fawn-footed Melomys. Fortunately the required rewrite can be done before recording.

 

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Other / 17.10.2011

Today an intern at a London art gallery emailed me about Light/Sound Workshop, to which I belonged during my time at Hornsey College of Art. Hers was the second such enquiry following one from the author of a book on the Pink Floyd. But she wanted information about events after I left art college and about which I knew nothing.