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.
I returned to film the many species of fungi growing in a sizeable area of mulch in the park opposite my home, having previously filmed a very large species there 10 days ago. Because of the variety of species I was filming for a good two hours. Which may have been why I noticed a set of lower dentures lying in the mulch, not far from the only picnic table in the park. I was mildly intrigued by their presence but left them in situ.
Jaap showed me an insect cluster on a tree in a rainforest patch being given some love and attention by Land Care. I returned with my camera and filmed what looked more like worms than caterpillars, writhing on the tree. I thought of caterpillars because I had seen them clustering on bushes in Bellingen, New South Wales, years ago.
PS I was subsequently told that they were Sawfly larvae. Perhaps that is what I saw in Bellingen.
I have been filming the flange roots of Yellow carabeen trees lately, initially in Joalah and MacDonald National Parks, today in Palm Grove. The roots can reach to 8m high or they can extend for several metres from the trunk. I was retracing the path we took on a night shoot a few days ago. Some fungi on a tree caught my eye. On closer inspection the fungi contained an interesting bug which obligingly performed for the camera. I was just about to move on when I noticed a dark line above the fungi which turned out to be a smaller specimen of a spectacular flat worm I filmed in MacDonald NP on a night shoot six weeks ago. I was able to film this worm travel half way round the tree trunk and descend to its base. The worm is one of those intriguing species which have so far defied identification.
Steve and I completed another 4 videos from the list of old Standard Definition footage for EOL via vimeo, bringing the total to 54, of which 27 have been uploaded since EOL started harvesting from vimeo. We also made all the older videos devoted to a single species, EOL harvestable.
Tonight was our 43rd night shoot. We have been maintaining a weekly night filming schedule since the start of the season in mid October. Because of a year or more of wet weather, the paths in the national parks have grown increasingly muddy. There was little doing until we were almost out of the Knoll on our way back, when we heard a rustling sound near the path. On examination it turned out to be an echidna jammed under a tree root. Conditions for filming were a bit cramped, but I managed to video the echidna backing out from under the root, steering itself to face in my direction and lumbering towards me blowing bubbles through its snout. It had only seemed like a few months ago that we saw what in all likelihood was this very echidna in more or less the same part of the park, but at the start of our shoot. Before I could set up the camera, it had hidden itself. What seemed a few months was in reality 1 ¼ years ago.
Martin Leet emailed me the link to my first Brisbane Line article of 2011 about the decline of the West. It was written before the Arab spring, but appeared after the overthrow of the despotic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and, inter alia, reflected my concern that the Arab people showed no sign of rising up against their rulers. You can read the article here.
WE HAD BETTER GET USED TO IT
Nothing lasts. Intellectually I knew that the centuries long global dominance of the west, which is the context for much of my life experience and from which I have derived immense benefit, was bound to decline. For decades I never imagined I would see it begin in my life time. Over the years, I recognised the record of capricious voting patterns on human rights issues in the UN as a tell-tale sign of a dent in western influence. At first glance, the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup with its dubious voting procedure and Qatar’s puzzling victory, could be regarded as a further instance. A fundamentalist led, revitalised Islam, presents a challenge, though not only to the west. But it is the… Read Complete Text
