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 / 22.09.2009

The start of a new season of filming moths on the garage I belatedly discovered as a good location for this purpose (see my entry for March 26 2009).

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Film Diary / 18.09.2009

Have embarked on filming a Scrub Turkey, mound gathering and mound building in the Wild Garden. The work is undertaken by the male. He uses his very powerful feet to scratch leaf litter from the ground within a radius of 25 metres from the mound site, by repeatedly retracing his steps and ultimately leaving bare ground behind him. Nothing appears to stop him. He will scrape his material over rocks and the roots of large trees, ending up with a mound which may contain up to four tons of material – earth, leaves and sticks.

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The Brisbane Line / 06.09.2009

My latest article is titled The Immature Mature, as flagged in my June 1 blog entry.

THE IMMATURE MATURE

On April 16 2009 an explosion killed five people and injured many more on an asylum seeker boat carrying 49 Afghans being escorted to Christmas Island by an Australian navy vessel.  The reaction among journalists was a childish impatience in their demand to be told immediately and as of right, exactly what occurred when the news of this complex event far out to sea, broke. However, within hours, the Premier of Western Australia, pandering to the journalists and perhaps also to highlight the lack of information from the Federal Government, claimed to know, when he stated that asylum seekers had doused their boat with petrol. At the time the Federal Government had other priorities, such as evacuating the injured, announcing defence force and police enquiries into the incident, and adopting the position that in the interim, to drip-feed news would do more harm than good. In the ensuing days, journalists and the government’s political opponents, blinded by the fact that their attitude of righteous indignation reflected nothing other than their own unrealistic expectations, had… Read Complete Text

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Film Diary / 29.08.2009

On a day I was checking out various parts of the Mountain for recording good birdsong (which we can always do with, for our Supplements and YouTube clips), I happened upon three alpacas grazing the lush grass of a paddock near the golf course. I regard them in the same light as the Asian Water Buffaloes, which were the first creatures I filmed with my new camera in April 2007 – as welcome exotics.

 

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Other / 22.08.2009

I collected the camera from the repairer. This was the first camera fault I have encountered during the entire project. I damaged my previous camera when I failed to stabilize the tripod, looking on in helpless horror as it fell to the ground. That piece of negligence cost me $700. Repairing my current camera cost $508.10.

 

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Other / 18.08.2009

More of WHSHT (click the more button below) emerging from the woodwork in the form of an email from the musician David Toop seeking information in connection with a project of his on the late John Latham. John was a bit of a father figure to us young artists when we started WHSHT. David contacted me via the website. He said some nice things about my project.

WHSHT –  THE WORLD HEALTH, SANITY AND HYGIENE TRUST

It seems surreal to contemplate that while I was having a ball in the avant-garde art scene of late swinging 60s London, the Neocons were starting to put together an agenda that would capture American politics more than thirty years later.

The ball started for me a few years earlier during my time as a student at Hornsey College of Art in north London. I was part of the Light/Sound Workshop which created light projections on screens or in spaces, to improvisational sound accompaniment. I cite it as one of the inspirations for the rock concert lightshows which were pioneered by the Pink Floyd. Mike Leonard, an architect… Read Complete Text