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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The Brisbane Line / 01.06.2009

I wonder how many people have asked themselves the question: is life sacred? and why. The basic premise of the sanctity of life is that life is God given. The question why is as revealing as the original question. In other words, why does someone having grown up with the notion that life is sacred, change the position of the word ‘is’. The notion aspires to be universal, yet one’s questioning of it is inevitably personal. For me the notion harks back to my childhood recollection of religious instruction and observance and, once encountered, was something I wanted to believe in. It is a question predicated on a potentially inexhaustible sequence of compelling questions.

In those far off, pre dictionary-consulting days, I associated the word sacred insofar as it was known to me, with the ineffable aura of religious virtue and divine dispensation which I sensed in the services I occasionally attended. The word represented a reality both private and secret.  In western culture the proposition that life is sacred is intimately linked to the 6th commandment: you shall not murder.  I was probably quite young when I first heard it and young when I first understood the… Read Complete Text

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Other / 14.05.2009

A couple of days ago I received a phone call from a man who was unsure who I was and who was unknown to me – until, after some stalling on my part and hesitant persistency on his, he introduced himself as Herbert Distel, a well-known Swiss artist whom I had met in Hamburg in November 1968 when I was co-curating an exhibition of avant-garde European art and he was one of the artists. He was phoning from his home near Vienna to inform me that his Museum of Drawers (to which I contributed a piece of multi-coloured bread), was in the process of going online and that next year would be its 40th anniversary. The museum contains 500 artworks by 500 artists housed in a cabinet with 20 drawers

divided into small compartments and can be found at www.schubladenmuseum.com.  The site is still under construction, but should be more advanced and may even be complete by the time you see it. This was a welcome call from the past and a contact that I hoped we would maintain, as I told him in my email.

 

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Film Diary / 12.05.2009

After meagre spoils night filming in Joalah National Park, usually the most reliable source of subjects, Jaap and I agreed to resume filming in early October. Other than the ever-abundant birds, little is stirring among the Mountain’s fauna in late Autumn and Winter. Indeed our previous foray a fortnight ago in MacDonald National Park was unique in that for the first time in over 18 months I found nothing worth filming. However, I was still able to film a moth on the garage in Central Avenue today.

 

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Other / 09.05.2009

I have received a number of complimentary emails about

Ant pulls leg, all of which have been pleasing because it is nice to have one’s work acknowledged, particularly those from naturalists and conservationists, of which the least expected was from Art Vogel, the Director of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden who wrote, ‘Dear Peter, it is fabulous.’ Another equally unexpected email was from an Associate Curator of the Queensland Art Gallery. These emails proved a good antidote to the burden of my email to John Caddy a few days ago.

 

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Other / 04.05.2009

The archive is an artwork, but given its running time of 18.5 hours it is unavoidably not as accessible as I would wish; hence my desire to show its scope and essence through video installations. Since March last year I have been exchanging emails with John Caddy, a marvelous poet and photographer who lives near Forest Lake in Minnesota and runs the Morning Earth website. He is profoundly into biodiversity, which he celebrates with a daily photograph and poem emailed to subscribers worldwide. I acknowledged his, in my experience, unparalleled work and unburdened myself to him in an email today, bemoaning the fact that I found that none of the art administrators and hardly any artist in the art and ecology movement as I have encountered it, appear to be onto biodiversity. They are either too urbanized, too interventionist or too limited in their approach to nature to take on biodiversity.

I pointed out that to make biodiversity an artwork requires above all a recognition of what constitutes a life form, plus an openness to the minutest detail, such as his photo of the track of a grub in bark, and… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 24.04.2009

For over a year I had been after Lenore Thiele, a retired ecologist, to let me film her digging up a fungus, to reveal more about its constituent parts. Naturally she was reluctant to dig in the National Parks, but today she told me about a suitable specimen near her house. When I called round ready to film, she showed me some fungi in her garden and I told her that they would make good subjects, so she dug and I filmed. It was just as well that we took the opportunity, because the fungus she had in mind, a far bigger specimen, had been damaged and it was located under a hedge, which would have made filming far more difficult if not impossible.