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.

Logo

Film Diary / 03.02.2021

This afternoon I visited Jaap and Elisabeth. When I arrived, Elisabeth asked me if I had seen a moth on a tree next to the front path. I descended the steps from the deck to take a look and saw a magnificent hawk moth with outspread wings. I dashed home to get my camera and took many photos. PS Peter Hendry duly identified the moth, which was a male. The wingspan is cited as 12 cm on a number of websites, but I am convinced that it was substantially more.

Logo

Film Diary / 24.01.2021

The other day I spoke to the owner of the ‘moths’ garage about not having photographed or filmed a moth there since last September (the 8th, to be precise). We wondered whether the absence of moths had anything to do with the LED bulbs he had installed and he assured me that he would revert to the previous bulbs to see if this made a difference. Yesterday, after overnight rain, there were plenty of moths at the garage, but I didn’t have my camera with me, though I was happy to see that the owner had been true to his word and kindly re-instated the old bulbs. This morning yielded only two or three moths, one of which I photographed. Its wingspan was only 1.5 cm.

Logo

My Travels / 21.01.2021

Jetstar sent me an email alert about changes to my flights to Launceston. Fearing the worst, I saw the travel agent who confirmed that the flight times had changed, but not the dates. Since I booked my flights, Brisbane underwent a 3 day lockdown because there was a covid transmission in the community by a cleaner who worked in a quarantine hotel. A consequence of this was that travellers to Tasmania from Brisbane were forced into hotel quarantine on arrival. PS The restriction was lifted on 22.1.21 because 14 days had passed without further community transmission.

Logo

My Travels / 10.12.2020

I received the itinerary for my visit next February, to Craig and Suellen, old friends who moved from the mountain to Tasmania at the start of the year. I love Tasmania, but because it is never reliably warm, will only contemplate a trip in Summer. I visited Tasmania when the Alexanders rented a cottage at Paper Beach in the Tamar Valley downstream from Launceston. The last time was in 2007. Craig and Suellen have bought a river-side property nearer the Tamar’s mouth.

Logo

Other / 04.12.2020

Yesterday a very helpful technician from Telstra installed my new NBN (National Broadband Network) modem and an NBN compatible handset in my living room and bedroom.  Today, the NBN technician hooked me up to the network at the node, which is on a street corner 100 odd metres from my home. The broadband service for much of Australia is fibre to the node, thence copper wire to the premises. I had to send a couple of emails with photos attached this afternoon and the upload speed was much quicker than before.

Logo

Book / 30.11.2020

I received my first bookshop order in three months. Canungra Books and Art came up trumps with an order for four books.