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Other / 23.12.2009

On 30 November, the day after I got back from Cambodia, I bumped into Jaap at North Tamborine. He told me about a confirmed sighting of a Tiger Snake on the Mountain two weeks previously. I spoke to Doug White who explained that the snake had been seen at night in MacDonald National Park. I suggested to Doug that the Queensland Museum and the Environmental Protection Agency needed to be told because the snake is not recognised as occurring on the Mountain. Today Jaap sent me photos of the snake, which certainly looks like a Tiger Snake. I had to remove the Tiger Snake frame from my Gallery based on what I had been told by Jaap, the Museum and the EPA. Once I know that the Museum accepts the identification, we can restore the frame to its rightful place.

 

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Film Diary / 18.12.2009

My second visit to film Golden Whistlers from the living quarters of a house next to the Wild Garden. The house is raised on poles, so that the camera was on a level with the birds, who either perch on a wild tobacco tree or a more leafy White Bollygum tree. I had long lusted after this very pretty bird with its beautiful, full throated song. The male has a bright yellow underside, a black head, a black collar beneath a white throat, and olive green and black wings. The female has a white underside and fawn head and wings.

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Other / 16.12.2009

Having checked Steve’s DVD master of Supplement 3, I was horrified to discover some content errors, such as a misplaced sub-title and a split second loss of image. These errors were on the MOV file I had posted to the National Film & Sound Archive 3 weeks ago. So I alerted Simon Smith who sent an email to Steve querying the nature of the error because there was nothing technically wrong with the MOV file. Steve emailed a reply explaining that we were dealing with incorrect content.

 

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Film Diary / 01.12.2009

Night filming at the Knoll National Park. Jaap had fitted a new battery to his spotlight. Olle Bakker, on a visit from Sweden where he now lives, had carried my tripod in the rainforest when I was filming the original archive and took on the job for old times’ sake. This was his first experience of night filming. I filmed beetles, a ladybird, a Brown Huntsman spider, a cricket, trapdoor spiders and a Brushtail Possum.

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My Travels / 29.11.2009

Cambodia 22 – 29 November  Of late I have visited Europe every other year with the intention of seeing another part of the world in the intervening year. Because of the global financial crisis I had no intention of going anywhere in 2009 until the lure of cheap airfares prompted me to book a week's stay in Cambodia (entry 7 April this year) to at last realise a long-cherished desire of mine to see Angkor Wat. By the time I had made all the necessary arrangements, my week overseas turned out to be just about the most expensive of any I have experienced during a lifetime of travel. But what a week it was . . .

I did not expect to see a set of traffic lights in Siem Reap (a two-hour flight north of Singapore), identical to many I had encountered in China, with an illuminated display for the road traffic, showing the number of seconds to go before the lights changed. I came to Cambodia with mixed feelings about the country (misgivings about its politics, coupled with admiration of its ancient culture), but I liked what I saw on the short drive from… Read Complete Text

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Other / 27.11.2009

An email arrived while I was in Cambodia, with some final IDs from Matthew Shaw, the Supervisor of the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum. I have sent several emails with requests for species identification in recent months, particularly for the new Gallery pages, with EOL in mind www.eol.org. I have been wary from the outset about being able to become a Content Partner. We have to upload our website content as an XML file to the EOL website. I have been in touch with a local IT expert and am still waiting for his advice on whether this can be done at an affordable price. Meanwhile, Matthew pointed out some of the constraints the Museum has in handling enquiries like mine. It is worth quoting extensively from his email, which struck me as very fair-minded.

DIFFICULTIES WITH IDENTIFICATION

Correspondence with Matthew Shaw, the Supervisor of the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum.  I spoke to him on 6 January 2010 and he gave me permission to quote from his email.

 

<from Matthew Shaw>

Thanks for your queries on identifications. We… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 10.11.2009

The first night filming jaunt since May. We chose the Knoll National Park and our first encounter was the rare sighting of an Echidna which hid before I could set up to film it. We filmed another semi-snail. The first one we saw was in MacDonald National Park (entry for 6 January 2009) which can be seen on Night Life 2 on my YouTube and Vimeo channels. They are remarkable in that they have a hump which is covered by a soft membrane instead of having a hard shell. Unfortunately Jaap’s battery was playing up, which curtailed our filming.

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Other / 18.10.2009

I was pleased and relieved to learn via recent phone calls and an email exchange with curator Simon Smith, that the National Film and Sound Archive will be adding Supplements 1-3 to their collection. Today I posted the MOV (data preservation) files to him. We are not quite ready to publish. Angela McKinstry is still working on the slick for the case which will house all three discs. Thus, the NFSA is yet to receive the DVDs, which comprise the published version of the supplements.

 

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Other / 15.10.2009

Today Steve and I met Serena Coates and Dave Allan at the State Library to discuss preserving the unedited archive. We are looking at creating discs in the form of data files to be downloaded onto the library’s computer server. Steve will provide Dave with a demo disc containing different data files so that he can select the one he finds most suitable.