Doctors Dome, 75 km north of Christchurch, New Zealand, is an early Pleistocene to Recent structure being deformed along the southeast edge of the Pacific-Australian plate boundary. Paleostress in the area has been determined in basement rocks of the Mesozoic meta-graywacke Torlesse Supergroup which lies unconformably beneath Cretaclous and younger cover rocks. Pre-Late Cretaclous multiple folding and bedding plane faulting produced a complex, low grade, metasedimentary basement with predominantly steeply plunging fold hinges and largely isotropic overall behavior with respect to later deformation. Probable Late Cretaceous WNW-ESE shortening and NNE-WSW extension of the basement produced widespread laumontite, calcite, and silica veins. Widespread but sparse slickensided minor fault surfaces are probably related to the same stress system. During the late Cenozoic dome stage, basement was uplifted, rotated and severely thrust along some of the range fronts to produce local high concentrations of small slickensided surfaces in the frontal areas. Inversion of basement fault data for the area indicates a general northwest compression with two peaks, one WNW-ESE parallel to the shortening suggested by the older vein system and the other parallel to southeast-northwest stylolite columns in the cover rocks. This direction is approximately parallel to regional indicators of contemporary deformation in and adjacent to the Alpine Fault Zone and suggests that the stress field affecting these rocks has not changed significantly since the late Pliocene-early Pleistocene. Like the San Andreas system, this compression is at a high angle to the strike of the zone as a whole, but is compatible with the direction of plate convergence and motion of the major faults. Between the overlapping ends of the Alpine Fault and the Hikurangi Subduction Zone the Alpine Fault may become subhorizontal at middle-lower crustal levels, partially decoupling the crust from underlying structures, and thus allowing oblique motion to be transferred directly onto the fault from the subduction complex, while aiding the change from subduction to continental collision. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1992