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.

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Other / 12.08.2012

I received an email from Vanessa with links to the community art residency she and Kat will be engaging in in Japan from 25 August to September 22. Vanessa is also exhibiting a sculpture at the Jing’an International Sculpture Biennial in Shanghai, which she will attend during her Japanese trip.

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Website / 31.07.2012

Ben Sinclair sent me his invoice to inaugurate work to the website. The big project has begun within two weeks of my return from overseas. Great.

 

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My Travels / 19.07.2012

This trip was different from any other I have been on in that I was ill with bronchitis when I left Australia and only recovered towards the end of my 18 day stay in Londn. As far as I know I had never had bronchitis and the last time I was really ill overseas was in Israel in 1974. But enough about being ill.

London

My time in London ended up being about people and not a lot else, which was fine. I was able to catch up with nearly everyone I wanted to see among family, friends, researchers and artists. I duly delivered my copies of ‘Gravy’. I also enjoyed two of my four days of rail travel, a particular pleasure of mine, on my Britrail Pass. On the first trip I went from Kings Cross to Newcastle, stopping off at York on the way back. A few days later I went from Euston to Lancaster, an interesting place which I saw for the first time.

On the day before I left, after an off-again, on-again exchange of text messages, I met Jeremy Deller. He had been busy with… Read Complete Text

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Other / 01.06.2012

An email arrived from the Liaison Librarian: Art & Design at Middlesex University, the final home of my alma mater Hornsey Collge of Art. She confirmed her interest in receiving the copies of ‘Gravy’,the college magazine I edited from 1965 to 1967. They are still in the folder in which I kept them after publication.

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Other / 28.05.2012

I received an email from Dave Allan addressed to Steve confirming that he had loaded the test data files I had delivered and that there were no problems accessing them. I’m off overseas on June 9 and will be kept busy checking and possibly delivering the completed files after I get back in mid July.

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Film Diary / 16.05.2012

Night filming 72 with Mark and Hugh, the last of the season as the nights are now rather cool and fauna activity decidedly less. Nonetheless, towards the end of our walk I filmed a moth that wasn’t a Granny’s Cloak, a spider that wasn’t a Brown Huntsman and the unexpected highlight, a Dwarf Crown snake which was at Mark’s feet when he first noticed it.