“Well that was hard!” 36 Milestones for a Completed Thesis – Part One: Stones 1 to 10 (Timaru & Kakanui)

At the end of June, Lynley Uerata completed her doctoral degree with the successful submission of her thesis, “Insecure, Unpredictable, Hoping to Survive: Four Cases of Māori People Living Precariously in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand” (you can view it here). This followed a rigorous examination process taking a number of months. I first taught Lynley when she was an undergraduate student at the University of Waikato. She then took a graduate social research methods class with me, before asking me to be the supervisor of her Master’s thesis. I then acted as an informal advisor for her doctoral thesis, offering advice, discussing issues, and providing feedback on drafts of chapters. Throughout the time Lynley worked on her doctoral thesis, I also provided polished stones as “milestones” to recognise progress and provide encouragement – see “Twenty Thesis Milestones for Lynley“.

Milestones lie ahead of you on your journey somewhere, marking the passing distance, providing feedback that your end goal is getting closer. When reaching a milestone, finishing a phase of research or a draft of a chapter, then a sense of achievement and a feeling of satisfaction are gained. All milestones are also “stepping stones”, places to stand from which to launch forward. The final milestone on a journey is also the first stepping stone of the next journey. Of course, stepping stones also include the people a student mentions in their “Acknowledgements” and “References” – family and friends as well as supervisors and mentors and previous researchers (see Lynley’s “Acknowledgements” and “Preface” below, plus her thesis “Contents”).

The various senses of stepping stones are well captured by the Scottish folk singer Dougie MacLean in his song, “Stepping Stones”, where he states “We do not stand alone”, even when we are “out in the deep unknown”. I know Lynley prefers more lively music, but I also know she will appreciate a number of aspects of these lyrics (full lyrics can be found at the end of this Post).

As Lynley explains in her “Abstract” (Summary), the topic of her thesis focused on the struggle that a number of people face in New Zealand to live a stable and fruitful life. “A precarious way of life is characterised by interacting forms of precarity which embed insecurity, instability, and unpredictability in the everyday lives of real people. An account of the Māori experience of precarity since the pre-colonial era to the present-day is presented.” A doctoral thesis is a detailed and extensive report on a significant research project carried out over a number of years by the student. It is written for an academic audience (especially the examiners) and the use of theoretical and technical terminology often makes it hard to understand for many outside of the university setting. It is a major achievement and, as Lynley stated at the beginning of her “Acknowledgements”, it is very definitely “hard work”.

Most social science doctoral theses probably take about four to five years to complete, some much longer – Lynley’s took about twice that and my own took three times that (I tend to be a perfectionist and was also employed fulltime for much of it). One of the reasons for the length of time for Lynley’s doctoral work was the “engaged methodology” she chose. When studying poverty, you could restrict yourself to statistics. However, a better understanding of people and the complexity of their lives results when you engage with them over an extended period of time. Lynley spent time talking with a number of Māori people, visiting each of them a number of times and also interacting with them in different ways. This meant she could study only four people and their families, but she studied them in depth. A separate chapter is devoted to each of them, as “case studies” of individual experiences in the context of culture and economy and the highs and lows of daily life (below are the first pages of two of the case study chapters).

A doctoral thesis like this is a life achievement. It is the culmination of a lifetime’s interests, learning and effort. It expresses the student’s personality, skills and passions. So I am giving Lynley one polished Tumblestone as a milestone for each year of her life so far. These 36 stones, indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand, will be presented in three Posts. This Post features three stones from Timaru South and seven stones from Kakanui’s Seadown Beach. The second Post features 12 stones from Gemstone Beach and the third Post presents 14 stones from Slope Point. I had initially asked Lynley to choose stones she liked from the January 2022 Stone of the Day Series (see here) and she picked Stones 10, 12, 15, 19 and 22. I later decided to supplement these with additional polished stones.

THREE TIMARU STONES

Milestones one to three come off a beach just south of Timaru in South Canterbury (see Timaru South in TumbleStone2). Milestone #1 was January 2022 Stone of the Day #22, “a Timaru quartzite with windows”. A good social science thesis like Lynley’s provides a window into the lives of the people she studied. Milestone #1 is also unusual in that it has two contrastingly coloured sides.

The second Timaru stone, Milestone #2, maybe another quartzite, looks much better in person than in its photos. The photos fail to represent well its high polish, highlighting instead some of its tiny holes and rough patches. Or, at least, that’s what “I” see. The tumble polisher is like the thesis writer – we are aware of the imperfections of what we produce, and sometimes, if we are lucky, the “examiners” may pay more attention to the strong points, the shiny bits, not the rough bits.

Milestone #3 is the smallest of the three Timaru stones. It has a distinctive silica band running diagonally through opaque yellow material – that and the other silica throughout the stone is a bit like the insights that hold together and illuminate the detailed arguments of a thesis.

SEVEN KAKANUI STONES

The next seven milestones were found on a beach not far from the small town of Kakanui in North Otago (see Kakanui’s Seadown Beach in TumbleStone2). Milestone #4 is a nicely polished quartzite of an unusual green hue, an interesting mix of dark and light variations:

Milestone #5 is a quartz-type stone of light caramel colour with interestingly shaped light-coloured bands and patches:

One of the more complex Kakanui stones is Milestone #6. I didn’t realise its beauty until I was working to produce the close-ups. These revealed a rich tapestry of colours and patterns, some suggestive of three-dimensional clouds. A good thesis, like Lynley’s, also has a complex and multi-layered character. This is one side of the stone:

This is the other side of the stone:

Milestone #7 is the largest of the 36 stones I am sending to Lynley, five centimetres long and 80 grams in weight. It has alternating bands of clear silica with a clay-like material, plus some thin dark lines. On one side, the first shown below, the largest clay-like band in noticeably indented, while the surface of the other side is much smoother. This stone stood out clearly when I found it, wet on the beach, the clay-like bands glistening brightly.

Sometimes stones have fossils in them, preserved remnants of creatures. What was once living is frozen in time, just like a thesis does in relation to what it describes and explains. Milestone #8 is an example of a type of stone I sometimes find on Kakanui’s Seadown Beach – it has been referred to as fossilised ancient seafloor (see “A Small Kakanui Fossil Seafloor Stone“). These stones often contain lots of tiny fossils, especially shells that once accumulated on the seabed. The close-up photos are especially good at revealing the complexity and variety in the stone.

The two final Kakanui milestones are both quartzites, but of different character and colour (see this Post, the entry for Wednesday 26 May 2021, for an account of some of the colour variation in Kakanui quartzites). Milestone #9 has the clouds of colour often seen in such stones, but instead of the more common yellow (see here), they are a brownish-red.

The colour of the Milestone #10 quartzite is mainly a light cream, and its clouds are more compact. There are also bands of clear silica within. Both Milestones #9 and #10 have the tiny clear crystals typical of these quartzites, which become especially apparent in the close-ups.

The next Post in this Series presents Milestones #11 to #22, a dozen tumble-polished stones from Gemstone Beach.

***** *****

“Stepping Stones” by Dougie MacLean

And so much time has gone since we worked out in these open fields
With the hopes of generations pulled around us and a strength revealed
And so much has been done since we ran around the Snaigow Wood
Never knowing where our gentle lights might lead us, or if indeed they could

And we do not stand alone
I know we stand with all the others
Out in the deep unknown
I know we stand upon their stepping stones

Sure and simple souls guarded round us as we worldly grew
With nothing greater than what working days might show them, they gave us all they knew
And though their dreams were small, oh their true and rural hearts were strong
With an honest smile that burns from somewhere distant, they helped us all along

And we do not stand alone
I know we stand with all the others
Out in the deep unknown
I know we stand upon their stepping stones

And in these silent hours when reflection lays our journey down
And we think on all departed conversations, it’s such an earthy sound
And so much time has gone since we worked out in these open fields
With the hopes of generations pulled around us and a strength revealed

We do not stand alone
I know we stand with all the others
Out in the deep unknown…
I know we stand upon their stepping stones

Main Source = http://www.dougiemaclean.com/index.php/s/85-stepping-stones