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 / 28.07.2009

Today a fault occurred in the camera’s tape loading mechanism. It would not descend. Fortunately the ejector still worked so I was able to retrieve my current tape.

 

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Other / 27.07.2009

I received an email from an expert on lichen in reply to my query about Image 12 on Gallery Page 8. He was able to identify three different species of lichen on the one small area of tree bark – amazing.

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Film Diary / 17.07.2009

For the past fortnight I have been filming Wompoo Pidgeons in a Moreton Bay fig tree adjacent to the house on whose lawn and drive I have filmed the pademelons. The tree merges into the rainforest of Palm Grove National Park. Wompoo Pigeons are typical of the breed in Australia, visually striking and of an imposing size, particularly this species which has a pale grey head and neck, green wings with a yellow band, a purple breast and yellow abdomen.  The tree is as much a favourite place of the pigeons as the lawn is of the small marsupials; there must be twenty or so birds in its canopy. They are elusive to film and always stay a long way from the camera.

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Other / 09.07.2009

Because of my wish to become an EOL Content Partner, I need to identify as many of the species on my Gallery pages as possible and emailed a request list to the Inquiry Centre at the Queensland Museum. I received a very prompt reply, directing my plant species queries to the Brisbane Herbarium and advising me that the fauna identification may take some time. I also emailed a mycologist whom I met at a forum in Brisbane (see blog entry for 25-27 June 2007) for help with identifying fungi, and a Mountain resident who is an expert on grasses.

 

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Other / 05.07.2009

Steve posted ten new video clips on my YouTube Channel. also created a new Vimeo Channel for me and posted the clips there too. Six of the clips form a Night Life series and of the others, one introduces Wollubinia Dorsii, the freshwater turtle officially announced to science in January this year and named after my friend Marcus Dorse.

 

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Film Diary / 30.06.2009

I spoke to Lenore Thiele the other day to find out if she had made any progress identifying a most unusual fungus I filmed in the rainforest and she mentioned that she had seen pademelons (the smallest kangaroo-like marsupials) grazing on the lawn of a house next to Palm Grove National Park. Sure enough, when I had a look yesterday some pademelons were there. Today I had my camera with me and filmed pademelons on the lawn and in the bush land adjoining the house. The people renting the house told me that they had counted as many as 17 pademelons on the property at one time. Although you can frequently hear pademelons in the park, you have to be very lucky to film any (see Film Diary 11 February), so I’ll make a point of returning to the house.

(PS 5 July)

I have now accumulated about 90 minutes of pademelon footage, including some of a young joey poking its head out of its mother’s pouch.