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 / 03.06.2010

I last heard from Katja Schulz on March 11. Dallas emailed her the changes he had made on April 11. I emailed her on April 22 asking her if EOL had received his email. I emailed her again on May 13. And now I have sent her an email titled ‘Limbo’, because that is where I appear to be with EOL. Katja has tended to be quite prompt in replying to my emails, so this silence is out of character, rather worrying and by now unacceptable.

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Other / 19.05.2010

This morning I screened ‘One Small Place On Earth . . .’ at the May meeting of the Probus Club attended by about 50 members. It may be its one and only screening. The documentary seemed to be well received and there were plenty of questions afterwards.

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Film Diary / 15.05.2010

I decided to film the golden orb spider I had filmed two nights ago in Joalah, when Steve took footage of me filming and Jaap talking about why he loves spotlighting. This was a species more common further north. The spider had been extremely active at night. Now it was motionless in the middle of the web. Nearby was a fallen, seemingly dead branch, several metres long, sprouting new growth, which I filmed. A bonus was a male and female Log Runner, a medium sized ground-foraging bird, which I filmed in the undergrowth.

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Film Diary / 01.05.2010

I was at the Knoll National Park to film some fungi I had noticed during our night filming a few days earlier when I saw a lace monitor in the picnic area on the look out for scraps. He was a large specimen and I was able to get some good shots of him patrolling the open ground. The monitor did not have things all his own way. A number of scrub turkeys were also after a feed and one repeatedly went for the monitor’s long tail, pecking at it viciously, so that the monitor formed his tail into a horizontal fiddlehead shape to make it a harder target for the scrub turkey. I didn’t film enough of this drama. I went in search of the fungi and only noticed them on my way back.

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Other / 28.04.2010

Today I posted the data disc to Sakkeer Hussein, comprising a number of my YouTube clips he had requested for his classroom project. Steve and I had to complete the Greenscreen DVD and eight new Youtube clips before we could turn our attention to compiling the data disc.

Sakkeer, a zoology teacher from Kerala in India, first got in touch in December last year on YouTube with a request to use some of my video clips for his teaching aid project for biology students. He has uploaded hundreds of clips of his own and other footage, covering a vast range of life forms including microbes. Here is his channel.

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Other / 22.04.2010

I had a bit of a win when I renewed my domain names for two years. I was able to renew both names for the price of one. The price has not changed from the beginning. I also have biodiversity.net.au.