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 / 13.01.2011

Today I received the great news that EOL is now able to harvest videos from vimeo. Compared with generating new website gallery pages and converting the data they contain to XML, making the videos harvestable only involves providing the binomial (scientific name) and family to which a species belongs, adding some specific tags and including the relevant licensing agreement.

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Other / 12.01.2011

I received an email from Lynne Sealie, the communications manager of ALA, which is an international partner of EOL, praising our website and flagging various linkages, including displaying my images on their site.

 

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Other / 01.01.2011

I felt somewhat daunted by the thought that I have such a backlog of images to get onto EOL.

I received an email from a friend, which caused me to Google the scientific name of the Leaf-Tailed Gecko. Inter alia I clicked on a Wikipedia entry provided by the State Library of Queensland and at the bottom of the page they included a ‘See the Leaf-tailed Gecko on the Encyclopedia of Life’ link, which I followed and was taken straight to my page! That was a real boost.

I phoned Simon to tell him about this and he replied with some terrific news of his own. He had proposed to Nicole early on New Year’s Day and been accepted. Talk about a great start to 2011.

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Film Diary / 30.12.2010

Maintaining weekly night filming sessions, we returned to the Knoll National Park. I filmed some intriguing small beetles, a large hunting spider devouring its prey and one of the strangest creatures I have filmed on our night jaunts. It was a daddy long-legs with huge eye-stalks and tricky to film because there wasn’t much of substance on which to focus. It was on an earth bank. Its second pair of legs were inordinately long. We’ll have to research what species it is.

I finally filmed a large millipede.

PS  The daddy long-legs is a species of Harvestman. We are still trying to find out which. Harvestmen don’t have a segmented body or spin a web, though they do have eight legs.

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Film Diary / 13.12.2010

I filmed two moths of a species new to me on the Central Avenue garage and then did some night filming in Palm Grove National Park in mizzle. I filmed a Grey Huntsman Spider, a small moth, a white spider in its web and two large specimens of the Giant King Cricket; the antennae of the second, stirred by a fair breeze, lit up against the dark. By now the rain was piercing the canopy and I had to stop filming.

 

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My Travels / 30.11.2010

My son Simon and I travelled to Palam Vihar near Delhi to celebrate his grandfather Andy’s 90th birthday. One of Simon’s missions was to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend Nicole, which we did with help from Andy’s wife Maggie. She took us to some well-regarded jewellers shops in Delhi to which Simon and I returned the next day; Simon eventually making his purchase.

We were able to revisit some of the familiar sights such as Humayan’s Tomb, the Red Fort and the National Railway Museum (which I last visited a few months after it opened in 1977) in between watching cricket on the TV with Andy. The years have treated him and Maggie well as to appearance. We celebrated Andy’s birthday in style with lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel, another old haunt. I happened to have a bottle of vintage Veuve in my luggage which we consumed after we returned from the Taj; Andy imbibing a now for him rare drop of alcohol with evident enjoyment. I succeeded in doing all my Christmas shopping in Delhi. We got back home on December 11.