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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Film Diary / 28.12.2011

For our last night shoot of 2011 we went to the Knoll. I filmed an ethereal looking katydid or grasshopper, a sweet, diminutive roosting bird on the end of a branch above the path and a female Harvestman, which, being smaller and duller in colour, is more difficult to film than the male.

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Other / 27.12.2011

This evening Steve added the final bit of narration (which required 6 sessions in the sound suite) to the remaining rainforest at night vision, so we now have the bulk of the content of our next 3 archive DVDs. We still need to do some deletions, dissolves and incorporate interview footage of Jaap, Mark and me, plus a yet to be filmed re-record of my introduction. And I need to do the wording for the slick and commission its design.

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Film Diary / 23.12.2011

For the first time since April 16, I filmed new moths on the garage at Central Avenue. The lights had been left off, thus killing my supply of any kind of moth. I filmed one large moth laying her eggs on the side wall, a rather unpromising spot.

 

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Film Diary / 17.12.2011

I thought it about time to see if I could encounter Harvestmen during the day, so I went to the Knoll on the 15th and drew a blank, but yesterday in Joalah, I filmed four male and two female Harvestmen on a rock next to the path near Curtis Falls. Even more spectacularly, today I filmed six males in a group on a rock on level ground in Palm Grove. A seventh male was just round the corner. Both here and in Joalah, I thought my eyes wouldn't be up to spying the arachnids

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Not The Brisbane Line / 13.12.2011

My last piece for the year, about Abispa ephippium, commonly called the Australian hornet, in reality a Potter wasp, duly appeared in the Tamborine Mountain News. They were as good as their word and have published me fortnightly.

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Other / 07.12.2011

Following a meeting Vanessa Stanley, Kat Danger Sawyer and I had at my place about collaborating on an artwork, Vanessa emailed me details of a public art project at Queensland Museum on Brisbane's South Bank for which she wants us to submit an Expression of Interest (EOI). The three of us had met earlier in the year at a discussion in Beaudesert at the conclusion of a joint exhibition of work by Vanessa and Jaap and then at Vanessa's beautiful and interesting artwork for the Brisbane Festival at the Powerhouse arts centre in Brisbane. Inter alia we discussed the idea of projecting my videos on walls in Brisbane, but the Museum project gives us an early opportunity to work together.