My artwork documents the exceptional biodiversity of Tamborine Mountain. Amid subtropical rainforest in South East Queensland, Australia, a thriving community lives cheek by jowl with a species-rich flora and fauna whose sustainability is threatened by population growth and global warming.

WHAT I DO

I film the range of species from lichen and minute bugs to mighty rainforest trees visible to the unaided eye on Tamborine Mountain by day and by night.

 

WHY I DO IT

To acknowledge the wondrousness of their very existence by showing what they look like as clearly as I can and to give people a sense of the unfathomable variety of living things to be found in this one small place on earth. Nothing about a species is more remarkable than the fact that it exists. I film species simply because they and I are alive on earth together.

 

PRESERVATION

The artwork, begun in 1998, forms a video archive. The edited, scripted and narrated footage is on DVD and on data files in the collection of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive. The unedited footage is in the Heritage Collection of the State Library of Queensland. The image library is in the collection of the Queensland Museum.

“I came to realise that biodiversity is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week proposition so the record now includes many hours of footage devoted to the wholly different world of the rainforest at night.”