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 / 24.02.2012

Vanessa forwarded an email she received today stating that we had not been shortlisted for the Queensland Museum public art project. It’s a pity, but hardly unexpected.

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My Travels / 18.02.2012

Every other year I like to undertake a UK/Europe trip. After mulling over possible dates, I opted to get the whole thing over and done with between the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics. This meant travelling earlier in the year than I prefer which unfortunately also meant no return visit to stay with Herbert and Gil Distel near Vienna. Today, my trip took more solid shape with confirmation that my deposit for my London accommodation had been received.

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Film Diary / 15.02.2012

Night filming 65, with Dan and Jaap and his partner Louise. This was Jaap’s last night shoot for the foreseeable future, because he and Louise have embarked on their journey of discovery around Australia aboard their converted bus. In honour of Jaap giving me his spotlight when he left the mountain last September I ordered a new reflector which Mark expertly fitted the other day. I filmed a beetle, an ants nest in a hollow log, a Net-casting spider with its net beautifully spread to engulf unsuspecting prey crawling beneath it and an Earth Star fungus. Normally I don’t film fungi at night, but Earth Stars are short-lived.

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Other / 10.02.2012

In addition to my ongoing email exchange with Anna about the Light/Sound Workshop, I have had a brief exchange with Ian Helliwell, who is interested in the history of electronic music in Britain and wanted to know about the musical component of LSW. Based on an essay about LSW I wrote for my degree, I told Ian that we made contact with the BBC’s radiophonic workshop and that the sound component was only addressed when we devised a demonstration or performance.

 

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Other / 06.02.2012

For reasons I do not wish to go into, John’s visit was not a success. Unfortunately we did not really hit it off. I was able to show John a fair variety of local fauna and flora on the mountain and in some of the adjacent World Heritage Areas. We also did a rainforest night walk.  One regularly hears of internet ‘friendships’ which fail the test of meeting in the flesh. I did not think this would happen to me.

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Film Diary / 22.01.2012

The second and concluding day of filming a nest of Black-faced Monarchs from the deck of a high-set house which resulted in the camera being just slightly below nest level. Two adults kept busy feeding 3 chicks. Yesterday I briefly filmed a Grey Goshawk on a nearby tree, possibly one of the fledglings from the nest I filmed last November.