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.

Logo

Film Diary / 20.03.2021

An exchange of emails with Peter Hendry, about a moth I photographed at the garage on 7.3.21 concluded today. Peter originally thought the moth possibly belonged to the genus Tineidae. I sent Peter photos of two similar moths taken previously and, after consulting a lepidopterist friend, Peter agreed with him that all three moths are different species of the genus Philobota, a very rewarding result, even if they could not be identified to species level.

Logo

Book / 12.03.2021

An email arrived from Port Augusta Library confirming an order via their usual supplier. This follows an exchange of emails on 10.3.21 with a librarian who is constrained by the Public Library South Australia monthly list of approved books, which typically contains 7,000 titles. My book was on the December list which cannot be accessed retrospectively by any of the libraries I contacted this month. PS By 25.3.21 I had received 5 Phase 2 orders. Once I return from Longreach on April 19, I intend to contact libraries in Victoria.

Logo

Film Diary / 11.03.2021

Today, Peter Hendry confirmed that a moth I photographed yesterday was a new species of moth for my album, and one he has not seen. There have been a marked number of such finds since the owner reinstated the old light bulbs in late January. The newfangled previous bulbs proved unattractive to moths.

Logo

Book / 09.03.2021

There were nine libraries in South Australia that I did not contact last November, an omission I made good today.

Logo

Film Diary / 24.02.2021

This evening I had dinner with Steve and Paulina and delivered a memory card with over two hours of new footage for Steve to download and time code, covering the period from 20 September last year to February 1 this year.

Logo

My Travels / 15.02.2021

For someone who enjoys travel as much as I do, it was especially good, during these covid times, to fly to Tasmania on February 9, after too long an interval. Suellen met me at Launceston airport, an hour’s journey from her home at Clarence Point, as the light was fading.  The house Craig and Suellen have bought is even more beautiful than their mountain eyrie. Its Japanese garden, planted by previous owners, is widely known in the locality. It was overgrown and unkempt, when they moved in. Craig has spent months and a small fortune to resurrect its former glory and build a labyrinth of paths which must stretch for several hundred metres in all. They have been in Tasmania for just over a year and love living there.

The house is separated by a road and grassed area from the Tamar River, where it widens into promontories, that on the far bank concealing Bell Bay, Tasmania’s main commercial port, and the one on the near bank shielding Beauty Point from view. Beyond the river are ranges of hills and far-off mountains. The field behind the house was animated by sheep and the occasional rabbit. Flocks of masked… Read Complete Text