As I set out on my morning walk, a fallen bunya pine cone stood out on the grass of the park opposite my unit. Just an hour before, for the first time in months, the grass had been cut. Otherwise the cone, large as it is, would not have been as visible. I have never known a cone to fall in December. Usually on the mountain, they fall in the second half of January and in February. A group of bunya pines graces the side of the road further along my route. Two of the trees grow on each side of a drive at whose entrance the property owner was adjusting a shade cloth. I told her about the cone in the park and she showed me three which she had found this morning. A very fierce wind blew all yesterday, which may have dislodged the cones. There are several other bunya pine trees in the park, yet I only saw the one cone. Because we are enduring a severe drought, all the vegetation is stressed. The trees are shedding leaves as never before and I suspect that is why the bunya pines have shed cones early in December…. Read Complete Text
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.