I have received a number of complimentary emails about

Ant pulls leg, all of which have been pleasing because it is nice to have one’s work acknowledged, particularly those from naturalists and conservationists, of which the least expected was from Art Vogel, the Director of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden who wrote, ‘Dear Peter, it is fabulous.’ Another equally unexpected email was from an Associate Curator of the Queensland Art Gallery. These emails proved a good antidote to the burden of my email to John Caddy a few days ago.

The archive is an artwork, but given its running time of 18.5 hours it is unavoidably not as accessible as I would wish; hence my desire to show its scope and essence through video installations. Since March last year I have been exchanging emails with John Caddy, a marvelous poet and photographer who lives near Forest Lake in Minnesota and runs the Morning Earth website. He is profoundly into biodiversity, which he celebrates with a daily photograph and poem emailed to subscribers worldwide. I acknowledged his, in my experience, unparalleled work and unburdened myself to him in an email today, bemoaning the fact that I found that none of the art administrators and hardly any artist in the art and ecology movement as I have encountered it, appear to be onto biodiversity. They are either too urbanized, too interventionist or too limited in their approach to nature to take on biodiversity.

I pointed out that to make biodiversity an artwork requires above all a recognition of what constitutes a life form, plus an openness to the minutest detail, such as his photo of the track of a grub in bark, and… Read Complete Text

For the first time since November 2007, we posted a new video on YouTube and took steps to open a Vimeo account with a 60 second clip of a tiny ant dragging the leg of a King Cricket up a large rainforest tree at night. The leg is many times the length of the ant. What is totally amazing about filming at night is the fact that the creatures we illuminate were going about their business in total or near total darkness. It is truly a different earth at night, still an active if relatively silent one.

Was notified by email that my entry for the Green Screen Festival, The Beauty of Overlooked Things, posted on 20 March, had safely arrived in Eckernfoerde. I received no notification that my entry to FICA 11, an international environmental film festival in Brazil, posted 12 February, had been received. I don’t really regard myself as a filmmaker, but welcome the chance to circulate my work, which such festivals offer. Ideally, I would like film festivals devoted to natural history to include a category for environmental artists.

I received a reply from the minister’s senior policy advisor declining to provide a grant, but directing me to possible funding sources.

Today, following a phone conversation with his senior advisor, I posted a letter to Andrew MacNamara, Queensland Minister for Sustainability, asking him for a grant so that Steve and I can put the 40 hours of the unedited Standard Definition archive onto a Raid hard-drive (mirror back-up) in 20 minute sequences. This will enable the State Library to create DVDs as needed. It will also enable the Library to migrate the material to future preservation and access technology.

This evening I was at Steve’s working on the soundtrack for Supplement 1, having recorded the narration in a sound booth at Bond University Film School late last year. Hopefully one more week will see its completion. I will revise the script for Supplement 2 so that we can record the narration for it. Supplement 3 will be an interview in two parts with Darryl Jones, an ecologist and Associate Professor from Griffith University. It was filmed just before my overseas trip last year and last November. I plan to issue the 3 supplements at the same time.

Following a visit to my place in October by Jo Ritale, Manager, Original Materials Heritage Collections, I wrote her a letter confirming my intention to donate, in due course, the unedited DVCAM tapes and associated papers of my archive to the State Library. I also mentioned my intention to put the tapes onto a hard-drive for access on DVDs. Jo replied by letter just before she left to take up a post in Melbourne, acknowledging my donation and providing contact details for her successor. Exchange of letters 14th and 28th of November

Today I filmed a second interview with Darryl Jones. In the rush to complete the Beauty Series DVD before my overseas trip, I clean forgot to mention the first interview I had filmed with him on the 3rd of July. The second interview was needed so that Darryl could talk about global warming and its effects on the local biodiversity. He also spoke about Tamborine Mountain as a place where the southern and northern limits of species overlap and about the age of the Mountain’s rainforest. For the first interview I asked Darryl to talk about some of the basic science of biodiversity, touching on species grouping and identification and key relationships between species. Then I wanted to hear about the distinctive features of the biodiversity of South East Queensland and its vulnerability, ditto for Tamborine Mountain. Finally Darryl spoke about a pet subject of his, harking back more than 20 years to his research into scrub turkeys conducted on the Mountain. The males construct mounds containing up to 4 tons of material in which the females deposit eggs. The young hatch and emerge from deep inside the mound and are left to fend for themselves. Their… Read Complete Text

Quite out of the blue I received an email from Art Vogel, the Curator of the Leiden Botanical Garden, whom I met briefly on my visit there in late August.  Constance, the information officer at the Garden, had forwarded him an email I had sent her. He is very keen on cycads and has an impressive display of them, including specimens from South East Queensland. One of the Mountain’s small national parks mainly comprises a grove of palm-like Lepidozamia peroffskyana. Art wrote about a cycad hunting visit to Australia in 2003 and of his recent travels in Mexico where he was impressed by some huge cacti. I attached a couple of frames of the Mountain’s very own huge cactus, a Cereus jamacaru, to the email I sent him. The cactus is a native ofBrazil, resembles a tree and grows to 9m or 30’ tall. Its trunk is 45cm or 18” in diameter, so this is as good a specimen as one is ever likely to find. Exchange of emails 20th and 26th of November