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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My Travels / 04.03.2022

My travel insurance arrived in the post. Taking Gina at her word, I phoned Suncorp, with whom I have two bank accounts plus car and contents insurance, to enquire about travel insurance. Every time the menu referred to travel insurance I hit the required number, only finally to be told that Suncorp no longer provided travel insurance. Fortunately, RACQ, the state’s premier motoring organisation of which I am a member, have a large travel business and they were able to meet all my needs for $1,365.40, which included a sizeable discount.

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Film Diary / 22.02.2022

I saw the bird on my walk this morning, swimming in the dam, then much depleted, which forms in the paddock next to Driscoll Lane after persistent rain. I knew I had never seen it before and that, as it swam, it looked so unlike the few ducks who were also in the water; even more so when I photographed it on the bank, at up to 28 times optical zoom. The bird was an immature Little Pied Cormorant, lacking the white above the eye of the adult. It is one of Australia’s most common water birds and is found throughout the country. PS I saw it swimming and diving next day, the dam level having sharply risen after overnight rain. Its dive took it a fair distance underwater. I didn’t have my camera with me.

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Other / 15.02.2022

This evening, Steve and I recorded my comments for the Grateful Dead podcast at one of Bond University’s sound studios. It seems to have gone well.

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Other / 13.02.2022

On my walk this morning, a severe gust of wind sucked my cap aloft from my head and took it completely from view. This has never happened to me before. Always, until today, the cap has landed on the ground nearby and rolled along until I could retrieve it. To add insult to injury, I had to curtail my walk because the sun was shining on my bald pate.

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My Travels / 08.02.2022

This morning I visited Gina, my travel agent, and booked a trip to the UK and Europe, which I last visited six years ago, an inordinate gap in my travel schedule. My preferred accommodation in London, an apartment in Belsize Park, was unavailable, so I opted for a hotel which is even closer to Belsize Park underground station, limiting my time in London to eight days instead of two weeks, given that my beloved cousin Leila is no longer alive, but sufficient time for me to catch up with family and friends and have tea ay Betty’s in Harrogate. I will be spending a week with Clive, mostly in Somerset, where he lives, but also overnighting in Cornwall.

I love train travel, so will book a Eurail pass, which now includes post-Brexit Britain, whereas previously I had to get a separate Britrail pass (go figure). I have also booked an eight day Rhine cruise between Amsterdam and Basel, from where I will return directly to Amsterdam by train, spending four nights there and using my rail pass to travel to the Hague and my favourite art gallery, the Mauritshuis, and to the many splendid old towns and cities… Read Complete Text

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Other / 31.01.2022

I received an email from the Queensland Museum Images Administrator letting me know that the USB arrived last week and that she could open the image files and data documents.