[After 30 years as a lecturer at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand]
I recall standing at the front of a lecture theatre maybe 20 years ago, about to introduce Dr Russell Bishop from Education as a guest lecturer to my second-year class in social research methods. I had asked him to talk about Maori social research approaches. I had not met Russell face-to-face before and, chatting before the start of his lecture, we realised that we had both grown up in rural Southland, a world away from where we were standing. He said, “Imagine that – two country boys like us, ending up here, teaching at the University of Waikato.” And I’ve always had that sense of wonder, and even privilege, in being a University lecturer.
Earlier this year, in anticipation of retirement, I started up two new ventures. One was to take up the hobby of beach stone polishing. This involves spending time on beaches, looking for interesting stones, a not unpleasant pastime. Here are two stones that I found at Birdlings Flat, near Christchurch – they look rather rough and dull and plain. You put a bunch of these of varying sizes in a small rubber barrel, add water and grit and later polish powder, then roll them around for a few weeks. The outcome is like this – the dull surface is worn away, the stones become nicely rounded and smooth, and bright colours and patterns shine out. I’m sure there’s a metaphor there for the university, or for what we do with students…
When I started tumble polishing, it was difficult to find useful and practical information on the internet about it, so I started a blog called TumbleStone where I write about the process. I also write about the beaches where stones are found.
It turns out that tumble polishing stones is not a bad retirement hobby for an academic who is still a geographer at heart. For example, six months ago my wife Petra was in the south of England, in Devon, and brought back some stones from a beach called Slapton Sands. Doing some research about Slapton Sands, I have discovered all sorts of interesting things about that beach – it’s a barrier pebble beach protecting the largest freshwater lake in south-western England; it’s a beach under threat each year from winter storms; and in early 1944, 30,000 acres around Slapton Sands was evacuated all of its 3,000 residents for 6 months so that the American army could undertake exercises prior to the Normandy landings. One Exercise, Exercise Tiger, led to the loss of about 750 soldiers and sailors, due to a German torpedo-boat raid and inadequacies in escorts and communication, and this tragedy was kept secret for many decades. In the 1970s a local guest house owner, who was in the habit of walking the beach looking for interesting things on it, heard about an object a mile offshore that snagged fishing nets, discovered it was a sunken US Sherman tank, eventually pieced together the story of Exercise Tiger, salvaged the tank, placed it as a memorial on Slapton Sands, and wrote a book called “The Forgotten Dead”… Lots of material for a geographer to research and write about…
[See here for the first Post in the Series on Slapton Sands.]
I have hugely enjoyed your blog, thanks! Visiting from Australia, I’ve been to Orepuki Beach twice with the intention of collecting pebbles. Both times the weather was spectacularly awful and I was driven off the beach – the last time in April 2018 with a layer of sleet on the windward side of my person. The green quartzites of New Zealand fascinate me.We have nothing like them in Oz. I didn’t realize that was what they were until I saw your posts. We found lovely things at Hunt’s Beach on the South West Coast.
Hi Gordon! Thanks for your Comment. Glad you’ve found the blog of such interest. The beaches of Southland sure can get uncomfortable at times, pity you didn’t strike better days.