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.
Hilde de Bruijn, Head of Exhibitions at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam, replied to an email I sent her about the archive and the overseas trip I am planning for July/August. She has invited me to get in touch during my stay in Amsterdam. I want to explore the idea of a video installation derived from the archive and titled One Small Place on Earth, which we were developing for the Eden Project.
Steve has started editing The Beauty of Overlooked Things video series. The idea behind the series is to make the archive footage more accessible as art, given the inherent inaccessibility of the published archive.
The series will comprise five 6-8 minute videos. I emailed Christina to ask her if she would do all the graphics. Clive and I had previously discussed on the phone the idea of a book based on the archive and which could include the Beauty series of DVDs. We intend to work on the book during my UK stay in late July, early August.
My article Two Cheers for the Wired World has appeared on the Brisbane Line. It’s about some of the consequencies of the tsunami of email traffic which confronts people in demand, and their largely inadequate response, which means that not only are they likely to be discourteous in failing to reply but they risk deleting the ‘out of left field’ correspondence which is a spur to creative and intellectual life.
TWO CHEERS FOR THE WIRED WORLD
I consider the internet a wonder of our age, born of another wonder, the computer. As such, the internet appears to precisely reflect the tempo and manners of the times in technologically advanced societies. It has transformed the way in which people keep in touch with oneanother and the way in which they acquire information without supplanting the previous means through which they accomplished these tasks.
My experience of the wired world is relatively brief and my use of it unadventurous, extending to a website devoted to my video archive of Tamborine Mountain’s biodiversity, footage from the archive on Youtube and communicating via email. I am reluctant to transact financially on the net. Nor am… Read Complete Text
Steve has completed the initial edit of Supplements 1 & 2 of the archive, filmed in HDV. I now need to go over the footage and start the draft script.
The Supplements are very different to the published archive. They do not follow the seasons, but apart from some grouping of particular subjects, unfold chronologically in the order of filming. Also, the sequences tend to be longer because proportionally more of the footage is devoted to fauna. I plan to keep the narration to a minimum and rely more on generating a good soundtrack. We’ll see.
Christina has adjusted the running time of the recently introduced slideshow on the home page, thus completing the blog update which she and Clive began last October.
We have introduced Gallery pages 8 and 9 which contain frames from the HDV footage and were filmed in widescreen. We have a March deadline because the State Library are planning to do a recapture of the site for the National Web Archive. This was initially scheduled six weeks ago to mark the site’s second anniversary.
On the first of November I returned from a three-week trip to China, which provided one highlight after another – scenery, flora and fauna, some memorable human encounters and one or two outstanding meals. Read about the highlights.
THREE WEEKS IN CHINA
I traveled with a friend from the Mountain. My main purpose in visiting China was to see Tiger Leaping Gorge. My friend’s main purpose was to see the terracotta warriors in Xian.
Though only about 30km long, the gorge, at 3700m, is reputedly the deepest chasm on the planet. We joined a small group of 15 people for a seven-day tour of Yunnan, flying into its capital Kunming, considered a bit on the small side with a population of 3,000,000, at an altitude of 1800m and predictably beset by pollution.
Our first day schedule did not allow us to breakfast at our hotel. We had to take an early flight to Dali, roughly the same altitude as Kunming. The cloud cover descended to 3,000 or so metres, concealing the mountaintops. At Dali we first glimpsed a… Read Complete Text
