Rock fossicking is more than just stamp collecting for outdoors types. Members of the 50-year-old Otago Rock and Mineral Club induct Bruce Munro into a world of ancient connections and petrified beauty.
Most people would not be here looking for garnet and jasper.
But Les Gibson is not your typical beach-goer. It is a mild winter's day at sleepy Kakanui, 12km south of Oamaru. Blue sky and languid sunshine give rolling waves and cliff-top cribs an attractive glow.
Mr Gibson, however, is paying no attention to any of that. Head down, walking slowly but purposefully, scanning side to side, his mind and eyes filter out all objects bar those of the right texture, colour and glint.
In an oversized bumbag slung over his shoulder, the weekday bakery system co-ordinator has a small yet specific array of tools, including a hammer-sized pick.
Because, come the weekend, Mr Gibson is an avid rock fossicker.
''There is so much that comes from the earth,'' he says.
''Some people collect things like porcelain, but we look for the earth's artistic treasures.''
Mr Gibson is on his way to the North Otago Gem and Jewellery Show, in Oamaru, but has agreed to detour through Kakanui to demonstrate rock fossicking.
It is low tide, so he clambers down a 2m-high bank, passing in a few seconds through millions of years of deposited sediment and volcanic rock.
In addition to a sharp eye and a love of the hunt, successful fossickers build up a good knowledge of geology, he says.
This whole area has had two periods of volcanic activity.
The second took place beneath shallow water and was a slow, rolling simmer rather than a sudden explosion.
''There was hot lava just under the surface slowly cooling, which gave time for the crystals in the lava to grow, producing quite big crystals . . . The rocks and minerals, because of tectonic activity, came pushing up through the vent.''
All of which boils down to this being the right place to look for red garnet, black hornblende, burnt-red jasper, grey-black speckled augite and translucent crystal olivine.
With surety born of more than 20 years as a rockhound, Mr Gibson approaches some large but unremarkable orange-brown rocks that would be submerged at high tide.
''This is getting into that volcanic material,'' Mr Gibson says.
''See over here. You see some glints of some big crystals.
''There's a piece of augite. It's got reasonable crystal faces ... And this looks like hornblende.''
He pulls out his geological hammer and begins to chip away.
Three nights previously, Mr Gibson and three other longstanding members of the Otago Rock and Mineral Club stayed behind after the monthly meeting to talk about their acquisitive love of rocks.
The club, which started life as the Otago Rockhounds, is half a century old this month.
Club members are celebrating with a 50th anniversary dinner tonight.
The heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, when the club could fill a bus for most field trips.
But it still has upwards of 50 members and gets more than half to most club nights.
Born in 1966 of interest in public talks by University of Otago geology department staff, the club has maintained a relationship with the department and with local academics, as evidenced by the guest speaker at Thursday night's meeting, GNS Science structural geologist Dr Simon Cox.
For half its life, the club has met in a converted church in Malvern St, Woodhaugh, Dunedin, which it rents from the local branch of the New Zealand Deerstalkers Association.
A frost is already forming outside, but those who have stayed behind radiate enthusiasm for their chosen pastime, which for each is more obsession than hobby.
They are talking about what they collect and why.
Having gone through the early phase of trying to collect everything, each has focused on areas of particular personal interest.
''Lise goes for the pretty things. Frank goes for the good stuff ... ,'' Mr Gibson starts to say, but the others burst out laughing and begin talking over him.
Lise Humphreys is the club president. Growing up in Christchurch, she used to visit Birdlings Flat, near Lake Ellesmere, where she marvelled at all the coloured stones that had been washed down the Canterbury rivers and along the coast.
''Six years ago, I decided, `I'm going to join the club and find where these elusive things come from','' she says.
These days, she mostly collects agates. Agates form when crystal solutions find their way into a hollow inside rock.
The solution coats the wall of the cavity, followed by another mineral which coats the first layer, and then another ... until the hollow is a solid quartz crystal.
Cut in cross-section, the various coloured mineral bands are revealed in all their beauty.
''I like that when you cut them open, it is always a surprise what you find,'' Ms Humphreys says.
Frank van Betuw has been collecting rocks since he was 9 and has been a club member for the past 26 years.
His interest was piqued by a childhood desire to know ''why is that hill there?''.
''My parents could never tell me,'' he says.
Mr van Betuw prefers to think of his ''good stuff'' as rocks with a bit of history.
In one hand, he holds a solid chunk of rock that has a metallic sheen.
It is chalcopyrite, a copper ore, from the Reedy Creek mine near Waipori.
The 19th-century miners ''salted'' the extracted ore with extra copper to make their find appear more valuable than was the case, causing problems for themselves when they could not replicate their initial ''result''.
Heather Wilson began collecting rocks as a child and has been vice-president of the club for 16 years.
She specialises in fossils and crystals: crystals for the colours, the shapes, the beauty; fossils because they are a link to hidden worlds and creatures of long ago, Ms Wilson says.
Mr Gibson's fascination with petrified wood - still bearing the grain and growth rings but now cast in stone - has similar motivations.
''It used to be a tree, growing on an ancient landscape, often from the time of the dinosaurs. We find the beauty in the grain and the outside texture sometimes too.
''It's that geological awareness as well as a sense of beauty.''
Collections are built by buying, trading and, of course, fossicking.
Monthly field trips are conducted to mines, swamps, beaches and mountains.
Most sites visited are in the lower half of the South Island.
But some club members went on a recent fossicking expedition near Dargaville, Northland.
And Trevor Gray, who has one of the largest rock collections in New Zealand, has returned with rock from Siberia, Myanmar and the United States.
The aim is to be judicious in what, and how much, they take from any site.
The club, therefore, is always keen to hear of farmers and other property owners happy to let them do some careful fossicking on their land.
Brazil might be renowned for its amethysts, Australia for its opals and Africa for its diamonds, but New Zealand, apart from its nephrite (pounamu), is not known for large deposits of precious stones or minerals.
''That's because, here, our rocks are very young and they keep turning over quickly because of mountain-building activity,'' Mr van Betuw says.
That has its advantages, as Mr Gibson explains during the visit to Kakanui.
At the start of the 20th century, scientists drew comparisons between the Kakanui geology and that of the Kimberley, in Western Australia, home to the world's largest volume diamond mine.
But no diamonds have been found here, he says.
''Which is good. Because otherwise there would likely be a big, bloody diamond mine here.''
Mr Gibson's best find along the Kakanui coastline was a sizeable dark hornblende crystal.
He spotted it, encased in the volcanic bedrock, while fossicking about 15 years ago.
''There was a wee bit showing, glinting in the sunlight,'' he recalls.
The next half hour was spent on his knees, geological hammer in hand, carefully digging around the crystal to extract it.
The feeling, when he finally held the brooding, millions-of-years-old stone in his hand was ''just like a goldminer finding a big nugget''.
''Yes, I've found this.''
The joy of collecting
Trevor Gray's rock collection is one of the largest in New Zealand.
Mr Gray has perhaps 10,000 natural, cut, polished and carved rock items collected throughout New Zealand and around the world.
The former owner of Blackhead Quarries, in Dunedin, said he thought he knew a thing or two about rocks, until he started collecting them 45 years ago.
Then his education began anew.
And it has not yet stopped.
Q Why are you such an avid rock collector?
A I started collecting in 1971, after coming across seashell fossils in Nepal, at about 20,000 feet, and wondering how they could occur in the middle of a continent ... It's about the hunt.
You get a rock that may not look much, but break it open and you get something beautiful.
And the people you meet ... You can have a huge accumulation of stuff, but it is the accumulation of the experiences, and the friends you meet.
I've had some terrific experiences.
Q What is one of your favourite rocks?
A Some of my favourites are not my best pieces, the crystals or whatever, it's the memory of where you got them and who you got them from.
There was Hettie's Rock & Crystal Shop, in Christchurch.
Hettie was one of the first rockhounds in New Zealand.
She was Indonesian-Dutch and went through the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp ... Just before she died, she took me into her room full of jade and said, "Take a piece and it's yours.''
It's a nice piece of jade.
I didn't pick the biggest or the best.
But it came from her.
Q You have perhaps the largest rock collection in New Zealand. Are you still collecting?
A I said in a newspaper article in 1998, that I needed to cut back a bit because of a lack of room.
But I've been to Myanmar and Siberia since then ... I went to the Oamaru show at the weekend.
I've been going for about 40 years.
I used to get a lot there, but I don't think I bought one this time.
Just because I've got most of it.
I'm not looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, more the hole at the end of the road.
And I've got a hell of a lot of rocks. I've got sons that will take a wee bit and grandkids.
It's a problem for everyone in the hobby, what to do with it.
What you don't want is what has happened in a few cases I know of; it's gone to the tip.
Even a lot of Maori artefacts I heard of in one case.
Q What is your most valuable piece?
A I don't know.
I have some jadeite from Myanmar that was carved in China.
I got it years ago.
Some of those things have gone up in price astronomically.
Q What is one of your most unusual finds?
A You can just be walking around and find stuff you never knew existed there.
We were fossicking around the Waitati coastline and found a beautiful hyalite opal.
It just looks like glass on the rock.
But when you put a lamp over it, it fluoresces the most brilliant, beautiful green.
50 years
• Otago Rock and Mineral Club is holding a 50th anniversary show on September 17 and 18 at the club hall, 53 Malvern St, Woodhaugh, Dunedin. Entry by gold coin donation.
