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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Website / 21.07.2010

Received a rather dispiriting email from Katja Schulz confirming the errors in Dallas’ XML files, although she acknowledged that EOL’s information for content partners ‘is a bit sketchy’. The upshot is that she has asked us to resubmit our material.

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Other / 14.07.2010

Having read Chris Palmer’s timely and groundbreaking book ‘Shooting in the Wild’, about the trials and tribulations of wild-life filmmaking, with his welcome emphasis on the appropriate ethical requirements of the genre, I emailed him my appreciation of what he had done. I recommend his book to all who feel that deception, misrepresentation, and exploitation of animals has no place in natural history documentaries.

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Film Diary / 09.07.2010

I wanted to reprise a memorable shot of a vine, descending from the canopy and spanning Cedar Creek in Joalah National Park which I filmed in 1999. Because this entailed a lengthy walk, Mark kindly carried my tripod. Before we proceeded beyond the end of the designated walking track I filmed a number of vines. Thereafter we were still on a defined, if somewhat overgrown path, crossing and recrossing the creek. I had forgotten how beautiful and dramatic the scenery was in this part of the park. Given that it was winter, I filmed a surprising number of fungi. It seems that for fungi damp conditions are more important than warmth. Eventually the path was claimed by jungle and we were obliged to turn back. We saw no sign of the vine. I could not tell if we had passed the place where I filmed it or whether it lay tantalisingly, further down stream.

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Not The Brisbane Line / 03.07.2010

You can read about My First Two Hours in Portugal here. It isn’t socio-political enough for publication in The Brisbane Line . . .

Strictly speaking this recollection of events is about the two hours which began when I walked out of the arrivals hall in Lisbon airport into the harsh light of a bright summer day in 2000 and scanned the long queue of people waiting to be put into a taxi by an official, presumably there to ensure fair play. As I pondered the queue’s slow progress, I made eye contact with the driver of a lone taxi, which was parked against the opposite curb. The driver gestured towards me and I made my way through the queue to his vehicle, relieved that I had found a quick way out of the crowded airport. I was in Portugal to spend a week with my oldest friend, David White, and his wife Fernanda, at their holiday home in Coimbra. It was my first visit to the country and the first time during decades of travel that I felt unable to communicate with anyone.

David had instructed me in a letter to… Read Complete Text

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The Brisbane Line / 03.07.2010

I failed to mention in this Blog my contribution to The Brisbane Line last November:

CHANGE THAT NEVER WAS

Amongst leading liberal democratic nations, the US and Australia are now swimming against the electoral tide which has seen conservative governments assume or about to assume power. A majority of voters in both countries wanted change in their national politics. They chose a more liberal, compassionate government after having to contend with 8 and more than 11 years respectively, of two of the most hard-nosed conservative governments since World War 2. The newly elected leaders, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd promptly obliged with commitments on the environment and social justice. The relief and euphoria was such that it led their more ardent supporters to hope that what they regarded as the extreme and uncaring politics of George W Bush and John Howard had become history. However, as with the flagged and hoped for measures to curb excessive corporate pay in the grimmest days of the global financial crisis, it did not take long for the old ways to reappear because in the minds of the perpetrators, mere moral outrage was never going to stop business as usual.  Thus… Read Complete Text

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Other / 02.07.2010

Received the last of eight daily emails from Peter Hendry, an expert with whom Doug White put me in contact, following a presentation of my DVD Looking Out For The Overlooked at the June Landcare meeting. In one of his emails he referred to difficulty with images. I thought he was referring to mine, but it turned out he was referring to some of the reference images used to identify my moths. I wonder if the Queensland Museum knows of him. I had some moths identified via the museum. This took quite a while. I sent Peter my email, with six moths for him to identify, in the morning and received a reply that afternoon.