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.
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.
The ‘Film Diary’ entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I am filming. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.
I got an email from a resident who wants a book which she would like me to sign, as a present for her partner, agreeing to meet me in the library tomorrow morning. Normally I would have dropped the book off at her home. Because I have temporarily run out of books, I dashed into the post office at North Tamborine and ‘borrowed’ one of the books I delivered yesterday, vowing to replace it on Friday, all being well.
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
When the books arrived on the mountain from China, I was relieved to discover that I could store 24 boxes of 10 books, in my hall cupboard. Today, I delivered the last box, containing six books, to a mountain customer. I am now, unexpectedly, left with no books for sale. The plan is for a handyman I know, who is as strong as an ox, to help bring another 24 boxes from the storage unit, on Friday. He doesn’t get here from Tasmania until Wednesday.
At a housewarming today, I caught up with a delightful Cornish man I have not seen for many years since he left the mountain. He had been shown my book by our hosts and wanted to buy two copies. One copy was for his sister’s two-year old grandson Miles, who lives in Cornwall. This is the second copy I know of, which was bought for a child. A third copy was bought with children in mind. These purchases echo a point I made in the introduction. “The book’s illustrations are ideal for children to explore or be shown, in short, they are for people of all ages to savour”. It is extremely gratifying to have this point borne out.
As expected, local sales, though not necessarily to tourists visiting the mountain, are the mainstay of my book sales. However, sales to libraries are clocking up, helped by the fact that their remit includes supporting Australian authors. I have contacted libraries along the Queensland coast – as a local author in South East Queensland and as a South East Queensland author elsewhere in the state. The library in Mount Isa, which is close to the Northern Territory border, has ordered a copy. Subsequently, I have contacted libraries in New South Wales to whom I describe myself as an Australian author, and today I received my first order from over the border. An advantage in selling my book to libraries is the multiple readership per copy.
Passing the garage on my walk this morning, I noticed a geometrid moth on one of the window panes. On closer inspection it was a species already represented in my album. However, there were numerous, unfamiliar smaller moths. Fortunately I had my camera with me to photograph a splendid foliose lichen on the trunk of a cycad I happened to see yesterday. One of the moths was tiny. I photographed it at 6 or 7 times optical zoom. I have emailed the lot to Peter Hendry and am eager to see what he comes up with. I can’t explain what brought the moths out last night because there was no rain.
