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 / 06.08.2011

Talk about animals knowing what's best for them. Today, after a couple of months not filming because of shot selection for the night footage DVDs, I filmed a pair of Tawny Frogmouths, perched on a vine up against the white wall of a house in Central Avenue, enjoying the Winter sun.

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Other / 26.07.2011

For our 'Rainforest at Night' DVDs, Steve, with Hugh's help, filmed interviews with Jaap, Mark and me talking about our experience of night filming, our favourite creatures, highlights of our 53 night shoots, the value of our night filming. We were filmed in Jaap's back yard which borders rainforest, but which had a handy plug outdoors to power the lighting.

 

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Not The Brisbane Line / 14.07.2011

A video frame and brief text of mine were published in 'The Tamborine Times', the first of a fortnightly series, in which I can inform readers about the species rich biodiversity with which they share the mountain.

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Other / 09.07.2011

Maybe 3 weeks ago, Ray, a neighbour of mine, told me how a bird had snatched his lower denture off his balcony table and I told him that I had seen a lower denture in mulch in the park a couple of months before. I won’t go into why the denture was on the table, other than to say that the bird was after food. Today Ray knocked on my door, wanting to know exactly where I had seen the denture. Its replacement was causing him discomfort. We went into the park and were looking for the lost article, when Andrew, a friend of mine newly returned from a year-long overseas assignment, turned up unexpectedly at my place to say hello. Catching sight of Ray and me doing inexplicable things in the park, Andrew strolled over to make his presence known and find out what we were up to.  After introductions he joined in the search and within minutes succeeded in finding the denture, exactly where I had left it at the end of April. Ray could not have been more delighted.

 

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Other / 07.07.2011

I have been working away on the Night Life supplements and Steve has been assembling the preliminary shot selection on 3 DVDs. Tonight we managed to do another 2 videos for vimeo, bringing the total on my vimeo page to 75. For technical reasons, not all my elegible vimeo videos have been harvested by EOL. For the past 2 months I have not done much filming. Things quieten down in winter, though, for the first time in a few years, we are enjoying day after day of sunshine and clear blue skies, typical winter weather for these parts. I love this weather and have really missed it. We are planning for Steve to film interviews with Jaap, Mark and me for the supplements at the end of July.

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Other / 14.06.2011

Steve and I have been working on Supplements 4 to 6 of the archive. They will all be devoted to the rainforest at night. Like Supplements 1 to 3 they will each be about an hour long. This means we have had to  suspend work on videos for EOL. Our night filming season ended on shoot 53 on May 10. Miraculously, given that I am unable to film in the rain, the continual wet weather hardly interrupted our weekly schedule. I have nearly 10 ½ hours of night footage and have finished part of the initial shot selection. Days of watching footage, logging shots and putting them into my lap top converted to Steve assembling them on his hard drive in 2 hours this evening.