Logo

Film Diary / 12.10.2009

The Scrub Turkey mound has become much bigger thanks to yesterday’s rain. The turkey was very active on and around his mound. Previous dry weather made it hard for him to achieve the correct mound temperature for eggs to be incubated, so he went walkabout and the only scratching he did was for food. Scrub Turkeys seem to alternate between being indefatigable and indolent.

Logo

Website / 11.10.2009

On 28 April, I emailed Steve with a list of 264 frames to be captured as stills, a fifth of which were of night footage. An early result of this massive capture is the addition of four pages to the Gallery, including one (Page 10) devoted exclusively to night shots. This represents a 44% increase in the size of the Gallery. Christina has just about completed the work, bar the addition of a few IDs for which I am waiting. Since each page only contains twelve images, we have plenty of stills for future use.

Logo

Not The Brisbane Line / 25.09.2009

Following a request from PSnews, which is the online magazine for Australia’s public servants, to re-publish my latest Brisbane Line article, I received an email with the links to the features page  and to the article. They made some interesting changes, which I think improved on the way the article originally appeared.  Read it here.

 

Logo

Film Diary / 22.09.2009

The start of a new season of filming moths on the garage I belatedly discovered as a good location for this purpose (see my entry for March 26 2009).

Logo

Film Diary / 18.09.2009

Have embarked on filming a Scrub Turkey, mound gathering and mound building in the Wild Garden. The work is undertaken by the male. He uses his very powerful feet to scratch leaf litter from the ground within a radius of 25 metres from the mound site, by repeatedly retracing his steps and ultimately leaving bare ground behind him. Nothing appears to stop him. He will scrape his material over rocks and the roots of large trees, ending up with a mound which may contain up to four tons of material – earth, leaves and sticks.

Logo

The Brisbane Line / 06.09.2009

My latest article is titled The Immature Mature, as flagged in my June 1 blog entry.

THE IMMATURE MATURE

On April 16 2009 an explosion killed five people and injured many more on an asylum seeker boat carrying 49 Afghans being escorted to Christmas Island by an Australian navy vessel.  The reaction among journalists was a childish impatience in their demand to be told immediately and as of right, exactly what occurred when the news of this complex event far out to sea, broke. However, within hours, the Premier of Western Australia, pandering to the journalists and perhaps also to highlight the lack of information from the Federal Government, claimed to know, when he stated that asylum seekers had doused their boat with petrol. At the time the Federal Government had other priorities, such as evacuating the injured, announcing defence force and police enquiries into the incident, and adopting the position that in the interim, to drip-feed news would do more harm than good. In the ensuing days, journalists and the government’s political opponents, blinded by the fact that their attitude of righteous indignation reflected nothing other than their own unrealistic expectations, had… Read Complete Text

Logo

Film Diary / 29.08.2009

On a day I was checking out various parts of the Mountain for recording good birdsong (which we can always do with, for our Supplements and YouTube clips), I happened upon three alpacas grazing the lush grass of a paddock near the golf course. I regard them in the same light as the Asian Water Buffaloes, which were the first creatures I filmed with my new camera in April 2007 – as welcome exotics.

 

Logo

Other / 22.08.2009

I collected the camera from the repairer. This was the first camera fault I have encountered during the entire project. I damaged my previous camera when I failed to stabilize the tripod, looking on in helpless horror as it fell to the ground. That piece of negligence cost me $700. Repairing my current camera cost $508.10.

 

Logo

Other / 18.08.2009

More of WHSHT (click the more button below) emerging from the woodwork in the form of an email from the musician David Toop seeking information in connection with a project of his on the late John Latham. John was a bit of a father figure to us young artists when we started WHSHT. David contacted me via the website. He said some nice things about my project.

WHSHT –  THE WORLD HEALTH, SANITY AND HYGIENE TRUST

It seems surreal to contemplate that while I was having a ball in the avant-garde art scene of late swinging 60s London, the Neocons were starting to put together an agenda that would capture American politics more than thirty years later.

The ball started for me a few years earlier during my time as a student at Hornsey College of Art in north London. I was part of the Light/Sound Workshop which created light projections on screens or in spaces, to improvisational sound accompaniment. I cite it as one of the inspirations for the rock concert lightshows which were pioneered by the Pink Floyd. Mike Leonard, an architect… Read Complete Text

Logo

Other / 28.07.2009

Today a fault occurred in the camera’s tape loading mechanism. It would not descend. Fortunately the ejector still worked so I was able to retrieve my current tape.