This morning, Jesse Jarnow, who co-hosts and co-produces the official Grateful Dead podcast, sent me an email. It contained a request for an interview to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Bickershaw Festival, where I produced a firework display to accompany part of the set of the Grateful Dead, who were the headline act.
Two days ago, I phoned the Queensland Museum to speak to the person in charge of the Museum’s images, having last spoken to him at the start of the pandemic, when I was advised to delay updating my Image Library. The Museum’s images had still not been put online. The person I spoke to was no longer at the Museum. I left a message for his successor and spoke to her yesterday. She wasn’t aware of my Image Library, a rather unsettling admission, but found the Deed of Gift. She is now waiting for me to update the Library, which I began doing today, starting with transferring the 246 video frames of Stills 24 to my Image Library folder and creating and writing a new data document, listing subject matter with species identification and location. Ahead is writing data documents for all the photos I have taken from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2021.
We are experiencing an infestation of European garden snails. They like the wheelie bins we use for garden waste, but are particularly fond of our letterboxes with their paper contents. The contractor who cuts the lawn and trims the hedges left an invoice in my letterbox, the day before bin night, which is the only time I open it because I have a post office box for my mail. There was just enough of the invoice left for me to post it for payment, to our building manager.
Around lunchtime I parked at the dry cleaner’s in Upton Street in Surfers Paradise to collect a woollen blanket. As I returned to the car, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The car next but one to mine was a Burgundy Honda HRV, number plate 105 VUV. My car is a silver Honda HRV, number plate 106 VUV. Where were you when you were needed 107 VUV?
In 1987 I came straight from London to Tamborine Mountain in subtropical south east Queensland – some twenty-two kilometres from the Pacific Ocean as the crow flies – and have lived there for the past thirty-four years. I was bowled over by the natural abundance and exuberance of the place — by the brilliant colours of the birds, the size and profuse growth of the vegetation and, above all, the alien beauty of the rainforest. I had not long been here when I visited nearby Lamington National Park and went for a walk on one of its many trails. Someone I happened to tell of my visit, remarked that there were areas in the park where no human foot had trodden.
This had an enormous impact on me, newly arrived from Great Britain, which, according to Paul Theroux, is the most minutely transacted, walked on, documented and recorded spot on the globe. For millennia its land has been bought and sold, mined, built on, fought over, grazed, farmed, re-arranged, hunted on, dug up, charted and mapped. It has been written about in poetry and prose, it has been drawn and painted, photographed and filmed and had music written… Read Complete Text
It didn’t take long for Steve and I to start work on the new footage. This evening we did the video frame captures and the titles for the four videos. The plan is for us to put the videos together and upload them to Vimeo in a week’s time.
For the first time in ages, I selected frames from new time-coded footage which I collected from Steve last week. The two-and-a-bit hours I had accumulated between September last year and February this year will only yield a paltry forty six frames and four new videos. Namely, of giant and shiny-leaved stinging trees, an Australian bag moth larva – an additional species, ditto a potter wasp and her peculiar antics. Regrettably, the footage of a tawny frogmouth adult and two chicks in a nest, of a Lewin’s honey eater nest, and of a paper wasp nest, did not improve on existing material.
This morning I parked in Main Street to pay a bill at my bank. On returning I noticed, of all things, an exquisite magpie moth resting just below the tread on the driver’s side rear tyre. Its name indicates the moth’s colour. It has black fore wings with a band of white patches two thirds of the way down and a single patch on the hind wings. Its wingspan is 4 cm. Alas, I didn’t have my camera with me.
Yesterday a very helpful technician from Telstra installed my new NBN (National Broadband Network) modem and an NBN compatible handset in my living room and bedroom. Today, the NBN technician hooked me up to the network at the node, which is on a street corner 100 odd metres from my home. The broadband service for much of Australia is fibre to the node, thence copper wire to the premises. I had to send a couple of emails with photos attached this afternoon and the upload speed was much quicker than before.
An email arrived from a lady at the Western Australia New Museum, requesting the use of four of my species videos for the museum’s platform. In my reply I granted permission on the understanding that the videos would be shown complete with opening and closing titles, in which I and my website are credited. PS On 28.11.20 I was told that the videos would be downloaded in full with my name in the attribution line.