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

Other / 17.02.2019

After many hours over many days, I completed the Excels of my species videos update for the National Film & Sound Archive. In all we are submitting 124 videos, comprising a few from 2016 through to nine from 2019, once Steve has assembled the data files. One video needs to be added to the list and I need Steve to clarify the references on four files.

Logo

Website / 15.02.2019

No sooner said than done. Today I delivered the USB with the 2018 additions to my Image Library to Michelle Ryan at the Museum.

Logo

Other / 10.02.2019

I have just completed listing all the images with locations, plus species identification for most of them,  generated in 2018 for my Image Library at the Queensland Museum. There are 443 video frames and 291 photos, a total of 834 images. Once I download all the images and lists onto a USB and deliver it to the Museum, the library will contain 7,135 images.

Logo

Website / 07.02.2019

Order has been restored to the site; the issues arising from the upgrade have been fixed. This means that, with the curating also having been completed, the newest version of the site is ready for capture by the National Web Archive.

Logo

Film Diary / 05.02.2019

This morning I filmed one of 11 moths which I have seen at the garage awaiting identification by Peter Hendry, since he left for a 2 ½ month cruise just after Christmas. The moth closely resembles a species in my album except that it is a transparent pastel green and not white. Hopefully there will be more on the list by the time Peter is back.

Logo

Other / 02.02.2019

Today I finished checking the texts accompanying the images for typos. While doing so, I found myself improving a number of texts.