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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Website / 15.10.2010

On the day before I left for Europe I had emailed Katja Schulz in the hope that she could arrange for the remaining corrections to the XML data to be carried out while I was away. Alas, no such luck. On October 11 I received an email from Katja stating that she could not publish my material until she received updated information. I sent this today, in the form of a corrections document which listed every error I had found on the EOL preview site, plus one or two on my website.

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Film Diary / 30.09.2010

We always see swallows on the Mountain, flitting about the shops or perched on overhead wires. For the first time I had the opportunity to film these attractive birds.  I found an eminently filmable nest on top of the security alarm of a real estate office. The nest contained five young and both parents had all their work cut out feeding them.

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My Travels / 21.09.2010

Back from my biennial catching-up with family and friends in the antipodes. I left Brisbane on the 7th of August. Read about my travels.

London

This time cousin Leila was too incapacitated for me to stay with her, so I booked in to a hotel, excellently located in Belsize Park, for the two weeks of my London stay. For the first time in three visits I did not meet with Sandrine Meats.

This trip I did things I previously thought too out of the way. I spent a tremendous day at Chatham Dockyard, easily reached by train from St Pancras Station. Between trains I even managed to book my Vienna-Frankfurt ticket. I also attended the first day of the Oval Test between England and Pakistan, highly enjoyable and a reminder of happy days spent there in the past. On my way home I went on the London Eye, which I had avoided to date, fearing a long wait to get on board. I don’t suppose it took much more than 25 minutes from joining the ticket queue to boarding the cabin. It was worth every penny.

I… Read Complete Text

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Website / 03.08.2010

Dallas copied me the corrected XMLs he sent to EOL, which will hopefully be acceptable.

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My Travels / 29.07.2010

Simon booked our tickets to Delhi online. He got us an excellent deal. We depart Brisbane on November 30 and return December 11. The reason for our trip is to celebrate Simon’s grandad’s 90th birthday.

 

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Film Diary / 23.07.2010

A first for the archive: I filmed a Spotted Pardalote in the birdbath in the Wild Garden. I had never seen, let alone filmed one before.