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 / 29.06.2010

At long last I heard from Katja Schulz again. She told me that The Biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain is on the verge of becoming a Content Partner on EOL. She provided me with a preview of all the pages to which I have contributed images and it was a thrill to not only see the list but very pleasing to click on an entry and see my video frame on the page. I emailed her, pointing out a couple of errors and asked her if she wants me to go through all the pages before she publishes them.

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Other / 22.06.2010

This evening I helped Steve capture 166 frames I have selected from recent tapes for our image bank.

 

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Film Diary / 13.06.2010

My friend Robyn Ashwin phoned me to report a flock of Wompoo Pigeons feeding in a fig tree behind her house. The tree was not as big as the one next to Palm Grove where I filmed the Wompoos last July, so I was able to get better close ups this afternoon.

 

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Other / 09.06.2010

I received an email from the Greenscreen Festival stating that my entry had not been selected for screening. This came as no surprise given that entries are made by broadcasters and the like.

 

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Film Diary / 08.06.2010

Last year we stopped our night filming on May 12. This year we are carrying on because the results continue to make it worthwhile, even if some of the creatures are hibernating. We continue to see possums and Leaf-tailed Geckos. Tonight, in Joalah, I filmed a spider securing its egg sac on a leaf suspended by a strand of web a metre from the ground. I then filmed a small snail which appeared to be growing a shell, although it had some of the characteristics of the semi/snail slug. Finally I got some good footage of the eel in the pool with the bridge. The water was much clearer than the first time I filmed the eel here. Of the golden orb spider there was no trace, just bedraggled bits of web. We arranged to film again in a fortnight.

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The Brisbane Line / 07.06.2010

Creating and upkeeping my Facebook page, and producing eleven new YouTube clips and the documentary for Greenscreen, has pushed writing articles for The Brisbane Institute to one side. My first article this year for The Brisbane Line is titled Ignorance. I want to write a piece called My First Two Hours in Portugal before I travel overseas. You can read Ignorance here.

IGNORANCE

Where to begin? On the face of it, my profound ignorance should amply qualify me to write this article. Boy, do I know about being ignorant, although ironically, it requires a person far less ignorant than me to get to grips with the subject. Confronting one’s ignorance is rather dispiriting; much better not to dwell on it. My Concise Webster’s does not define ignorance. It merely lists the word as the noun for ignorant, which is defined as – without knowledge; uninformed; resulting from want of knowledge.

I consider myself reasonably well educated. But I was forced to face my own ignorance while reading Jenny Uglow’s superb book, ‘The Lunar Men’ about an inspiring group of friends who lived in and around Birmingham during the second half of the 18th century and who visited… Read Complete Text