[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…
Two Birdlings Flat quartzite stones “in the rough”
Two Birdlings Flat quartzite stones polished
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.]
TumbleStone 