“Well that was hard!” 36 Milestones for a Completed Thesis – Part Three: Stones 23 to 36 (Slope Point)

Milestones mark progress along a journey. These 36 tumble-polished milestones mark the final completion by Lynley Uerata of her doctoral degree journey. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “Insecure, Unpredictable, Hoping to Survive: Four Cases of Māori People Living Precariously in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand” (you can view it here).  I am giving Lynley one polished Tumblestone as a milestone for each year of her life so far. The stones come from four different beaches. Milestones #1 to #10 are from Timaru South and Kakanui – see Part One in this Series. Milestones #11 to #22 are from Gemstone Beach and feature in Part Two. This Post features 14 milestones from Slope Point beaches.

Slope Point is the southernmost part of the South Island, located about 70 kilometres east of Invercargill. Tourists are directed to a carpark from where they can walk across a windswept paddock to the top of high rocky cliffs looking out over a wild sea. It is there that the Slope Point sign is located (see photo above, top left). Fossickers for beach stones have to drive a couple of kilometres further along a narrow gravel road before crossing paddocks down awkward slopes to reach their goal. NOTE – OCTOBER 2023 – Landowners are now refusing access to this beach, so please do not visit there without permission. See here for an account of a fossick at one Slope Point beach, and here for an account of another beach. Many of the Slope Point stones have arisen from Jurassic Era volcanic activity and debris flows, which also produced the petrified trees of nearby Curio Bay (see this brief introduction to the petrified forest and Mike Pole’s interesting account of Curio Bay). Slope Point stones are quite different from the stones found on the other three South Island beaches featured in this Series of Posts. The following 14 Milestones illustrate the diversity and colourful patterns of Slope Point stones.

The first two milestones from Slope Point were also Stones of the Day in the TumbleStone Blog Series for January 2022, so information about them can be found there. Milestone #23 is a gorgeous light-coloured petrified wood stone with agate veins. It was January 2022 Stone of the Day #10. As Wikipedia explains: “Petrified wood forms when woody stems of plants [or trees] are buried in wet sediments saturated with dissolved minerals. The lack of oxygen slows decay of the wood, allowing minerals to replace cell walls and to fill void spaces in the wood.”

Milestone #24 is probably one of Slope Point’s colourful rhyolites, and was January 2022 Stone of the Day #12.

Milestone #25 is a highly polished white stone with lots of tiny features. It could be something like fossilised sea floor, with tiny fossils in it, but I can’t say for sure.

Maybe also a rhyolite, Milestone #26 is a dark stone with interesting light-coloured veins breaking the surface.

From time to time, I have found orange and black stones with light-coloured crystals or maybe fossils in them. They are a bit of a mystery. Milestone #27 is one of these stones. It has polished well and there are interesting shapes, patterns and lines in it.

Two quite different stones with different kinds of light-coloured spots follow. A fascinating and complex stone is Milestone #28. When viewed in close-up, the white spots in it look like flakes of ash with tiny cracks in them.

The spots in Milestone #29 look like tiny crystals scattered throughout the stone.

Milestone #30 is probably a flow-banded rhyolite. Its dark base and occasional white patches make it an attractive stone. It has polished well, with only one small rough patch on its “underside”.

The next two are the smallest of the Slope Point stones. Milestone #31 is three centimetres long and two-and-a-half centimetres wide. It has a bleached appearance but contains tiny white and orange shapes and tinier black dots, perhaps different types of crystals.

Milestone #32 is three centimetres long but only one-and-a-half centimetres wide. It is likely to be a rhyolite stone with fine bands of what could be silica.

Milestone #33 appears to be a kind of petrified sediment, with alternating layers of dark and light gray.

The next two milestones are different kinds of breccia, stones with small sharp-angled fragments in a fine matrix (see the comments on Milestone #11 for some information on brecciated stones). Milestone #34 is eye-catching, probably a volcanic breccia. There is an amazing diversity of fragments, some with their own internal patterned structure. It can often be difficult to get a good smooth surface on brecciated stones as different fragments can be softer or harder, and some may not take a polish. Milestone #34 has polished well, though Milestone #35 has a couple of small rough areas.

Milestone #35 is a less colourful breccia, being predominantly gray, but some of its fragments are very similar to those in Milestone #34.

The final stone, Milestone #36, is light-coloured, a complex mix of creamy-white and light brown.

One of the main parallels between Lynley’s doctoral research and these 36 milestones is suggested by the close-up photos of the stones. The close-up photos reveal how the stones are constructed, showing the individual constituents that make up the lines and patterns and shapes. The fossicker is drawn to the overall colour of a stone on the beach, but appreciation and understanding are deepened when close-up examination occurs. It is the same when trying to understand a social phenomenon like “precarity” – it tends to be the overall statistics that attract attention, but understanding is sharpened and deepened by taking a closer look at the experiences of individuals. Lynley’s decision to spend a lot of time getting to know four people in the context of their everyday lives meant that her research took a long time but it also meant that she gained a deeper understanding. Her aim “to make their voices heard by representing their own experiences in their own words” (thesis, page 359), based on transcriptions of recorded interviews and fieldnotes, also meant that the writing of the thesis took a long time, but it was the right choice, the right path to take.

It took a few weeks to tumble-polish each these milestones, but the sea tumbled them for thousands of years before I found them on the beach. As Lynley states in the Preface to her thesis, it was the “combination of my cultural, educational, and employment history” that led to her doctoral research (page v). These 36 milestones reflect the length of Lynley’s life history, marking the years that led to this point of personal achievement. Yes, it was hard, but it was worth it.