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Not The Brisbane Line / 01.11.2011

The Tamborine Times treated my One small place on earth… contributions as a filler rather than as content. At best my video frames appeared weekly (while the publisher was on holiday), at other times fortnightly or worse, so I contacted the Tamborine Mountain News and offered my services to them. The Times appears weekly and contains more pages than the News, which appears every other week. But the News, run by volunteers, is about serving the community rather than seeking the last dollar and today my first piece, featuring a vine thicket, appeared in hopefully its new home.

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The Brisbane Line / 31.10.2011

Martin Leet emailed me confirming that my article ‘Biodiversity as Art’ was up on the Brisbane Institue site. I thank Martin for giving me the opportunity, which I greatly appreciate, of sharing my reflections on my 13 year biodiversity artwork and what it means to me.

BIODIVERSITY AS ART

It was my extreme good fortune to come straight from London to Tamborine Mountain in late February 1987. I was bowled over by the natural abundance and exuberance of the place – by the brilliant colours of the birds, the size and profuse growth of the vegetation, the exotic presence of bougainvillea and hibiscus and above all, by my first walk in the jungle, which is what rainforest used to be called. Then, after many years of environmental activism on land use issues, in 1998 I bought a Canon XL 1 digital video camera and started creating a video archive devoted to the mountain’s species rich biodiversity. I just did not want to run the risk of it succumbing without fitting trace, to the threat posed by development and population increase in Australia’s fastest growing and second most biodiverse region.

My preoccupation with biodiversity is informed by art,… Read Complete Text

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Other / 25.10.2011

The scripting continues apace and with it the species identification, with emails whizzing to and fro. Today John Caddy emailed me in reply to a frame I had sent him of a mosquito on a leaf at night informing me that the 'mosquito' was a Crane Fly. This necessitates not only a script rewrite, but a script re-record. Just when I thought I had got off lightly after my friend and naturalist Doug White confirmed yesterday, that what we thought were Bush Rats were all Fawn-footed Melomys. Fortunately the required rewrite can be done before recording.

 

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Other / 17.10.2011

Today an intern at a London art gallery emailed me about Light/Sound Workshop, to which I belonged during my time at Hornsey College of Art. Hers was the second such enquiry following one from the author of a book on the Pink Floyd. But she wanted information about events after I left art college and about which I knew nothing.

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Film Diary / 15.10.2011

The real millipede madness, when zillions of millipedes invade homes in southern Australia, sounds like too much of a good thing. Fortunately the millipedes of Tamborine Mountain appear to confine their swarming to trees, in this instance to some trees in Central Avenue, in particular a Jacaranda, whose rough bark provided some ideal resting places. A pretty amazing subject nonetheless.

 

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Other / 02.10.2011

Better late than never. I had been getting frustrated by the seeming indifference of some experts conducting a survey of the vulnerable Glossy Black Cockatoo, to footage I filmed of a family in December 2008 and about which they had long known. A few months ago the lead researcher got in touch and Steve and I gave him a time-coded DVD of the footage and today he emailed me with his shot selection.

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Film Diary / 29.09.2011

Tonight was the first shoot of the new season for Mark, Dan and me. The first thing we came across in the Knoll National Park were Red Triangle slugs on a couple of Flooded Gum Trees in the picnic area. These striking molluscs, characterised by a red triangular line around the breathing hole on their mantle, are a new species for the archive. Jaap left the mountain earlier this month, prior to acquiring a converted bus in which to begin touring Australia early next year with his new partner Louise. He generously gave me his spotlight. We caught up with our Harvestmen, more precisely a Harvestwoman. I also filmed a Stick Insect nymph, one of a number we saw.

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Other / 27.09.2011

Having emailed Steve the revised script for Supplement 4 which is more than twice as long as the scripts for Supplements 1 and 2 combined, I recorded the first half of the script this evening in the sound suite at Bond University Film School.

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Other / 13.09.2011

I posted the RADF application today. Hope it works out, but I'm not holding my breath as they say here, particulalry after being informed that a high up in the organisation wondered what my video project had to do with art.

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Other / 02.09.2011

Now that I am immersed in scripting the DVDs, I have been busy contacting various curators at the Queensland Museum and their colleagues elsewhere, in order to identify the species we have been filming at night for the past 3 ½ years. Today an email arrived from Christopher Taylor in West Australia who had identified an amazing harvestman we first saw at the end of last year and which had only been described a year earlier. Chris pointed out that he was only familiar with lab specimens and that nothing was known about the species' natural history. So any observations we can provide could potentially be interesting.