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 entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

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 / 23.06.2021

Last night, Steve and I put together four new videos, which were uploaded to Vimeo and this morning I completed all the taxonomic, descriptive and admin information and selected the thumbnails. The videos brought the total to 577. Two are about the mountain’s stinging trees and fill a gap in the record. The videos were added nine months after the previous group of five and more than two years after the 550th, proof that filming has taken second place to book publishing and sales.

 

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Other / 08.06.2021

It didn’t take long for Steve and I to start work on the new footage. This evening we did the video frame captures and the titles for the four videos. The plan is for us to put the videos together and upload them to Vimeo in a week’s time.

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My Travels / 04.06.2021

Today I paid for my flights to Uluru, where I will stay for three nights in mid-October. I will be joining Simon and Nicole who fly in the day before, whereas I will overnight in Sydney. Ever since I saw photos of Ayer’s Rock in the 1950s, I yearned to see it up close. Other places, seen as a photo or a tv clip decades ago, have had a comparable impact. It has been my great good fortune to visit a majority of them since I moved to Australia over thirty four years ago. It’s just that they are all overseas. My travel in Australia has been limited, largely confined to coastal Queensland as far north as the Daintree, and to Longreach and Tasmania’s Tamar Valley.

 

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Other / 31.05.2021

For the first time in ages, I selected frames from new time-coded footage which I collected from Steve last week.  The two-and-a-bit hours I had accumulated between September last year and February this year will only yield a paltry forty six frames and four new videos. Namely, of giant and shiny-leaved stinging trees, an Australian bag moth larva – an additional species, ditto a potter wasp and her peculiar antics. Regrettably, the footage of a tawny frogmouth adult and two chicks in a nest, of a Lewin’s honey eater nest, and of a paper wasp nest, did not improve on existing material.

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Film Diary / 31.05.2021

For the first time in ages, I selected frames from new time-coded footage which I collected from Steve last week.  The two-and-a-quarter hours I had accumulated between September last year and February this year will only yield a paltry forty seven frames and three new videos. Namely, of giant and shiny leaf stinging trees, an Australian bag moth larva – an additional species, ditto a potter wasp and her peculiar antics. Regrettably, the footage of a tawny frogmouth adult and two chicks in a nest, of a lewin’s honey eater nest, and of a paper wasp nest, did not improve on existing material.

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Book / 29.05.2021

This morning I set up my table at the book fair outside the mountain’s library in Main Street. It is a lively part of the street’s annual Five Senses Festival, which was cancelled last year due to the pandemic. In bitterly cold weather I nonetheless sold six of my books. Although it is not written for children, the illustrations are ideal for children to explore or be shown. I was particularly delighted that three books were bought by parents with young children, after I approached them to let their kids leaf through the pages. The first sale was to a mother with a three year old daughter and a five year old son. When she asked them if they wanted her to buy the book, they proclaimed a resounding ‘yes’. The second sale was to parents with a seven year old boy and the final sale was to parents who had only moved to the mountain from Sydney, the previous Sunday. Mum had an infant in a baby carrier and her eight year old daughter was engrossed in a book illustrating the birds of South East Queensland. She loved the illustrations in my book, which her parents were happy… Read Complete Text