Oranjemund characters

[SandyB]

Wow !! what a story ..   Have in my  younger  years  seen many a vicious flood .. seems more tempered  since they built the  Dam  up river ...

[Bertie Horak]

Truly amazing story, Bob!  Thank you!
I can only echo what Mike said.... hope you started on the book already!!!!!  I'll be the first to put in my order!

[Diana Rudd (Boehme)]

Great Bob...keep this thread going.

[Patricia(nee)Lineker]

Wow, that's my Dad!! Thanks Bob!! I somehow and somewhere in a vague memory seem to recall the "story" but it was never embellished or told as myth or legend in our family.  I will certainly ask Dad about it.  The one thing I do know is that in his younger days my dad was a life saver (surely as a cool a thing to do then as it is now??) and he used to talk to us about that at length.  I also know that that is where I got my passion for swimming as a young girl!! Thanks for the story!! I will try and find out if there is some way of getting hold of a copy of the article you talk about in your article.  Thanks, Mike, for linking me to the article!!

[Susan Kintscher (Lineker)]

Thanks Mike....

[John Haycox]

The number of child graves in the Oranjemund cemetery, mentioned by Mike and Bob, has been bothering me.

Could the number of deaths be attributed to Polio?  I remember in the late 1940's and into the 1950's all children were given medicine to take.  At one time school sports were banned completely.

[Bob Molloy]

Hi John,
           I have no recall of a single polio case in that period and in fact heard no mention of polio at all, though I do remember - at some stage during the late Fifties - the entire town being lined up in the ballroom of the Rec Club to receive oral - one drop on the tongue - anti-polio vaccine. 
The vaccine programme was thorough. Every resident (and every child) was checked off on a register. Others were either met on arrival back from leave for their compulsory shot or giving the option of leaving permanently. Management was very tough on that point. I heard of no-one who refused. All Ovambos were also given the vaccine.
I'm told the campaign was worldwide and so successful that Polio as a disease would have disappeared from the human gene pool and ceased forever to be a problem if it had been humanly possible to reach everyone.
As it was, the incidence of poliomyelitis declined dramatically in many industrialized countries. A second global effort to eradicate polio began in 1988, led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and The Rotary Foundation. This reduced the number of annual diagnosed cases by 99%; from an estimated 350,000 cases in 1988 to 1,310 cases in 2007. According to Wikipaedia, should eradication be successful it will represent only the second time mankind has ever completely eliminated a disease. The first such disease was smallpox, which was officially eradicated in 1979. A number of eradication milestones have already been reached, and several regions of the world have been certified polio-free. The Americas were declared polio-free in 1994. In 2000 polio was officially eradicated in 36 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia. Europe was declared polio-free in 2002. As of 2006, polio remains endemic in only four countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Dunno if you really wanted to know all this. If not, apologies, I tend to run on at length.
Regards,
Bob.

[SandyB]

Yes and there  was also the TB vaccination program ,,,  the powers  of  this country have in their wisdom stopped  it .. what do we have  now  multi drug resisitant variety .. so darn short sighted .. sooner try to plug the holes with treatment with  folk who  default the minute they feel better .. Uugh ! 

[Bob Molloy]

John Cundill

An Oranjemunder who went on to become a successful script writer, so much so that his work dominated the early days of South African television and gained a swag of awards.  He arrived in Oranjemund in the late Fifties after graduating from the Speech and Drama School at UCT. His aim was a year on the mines to fund another year of overseas travel. 
A very congenial character, endlessly enthusiastic about his literary interests, he spent his year at HMS as an operator minding a noisy rotary crusher, which he quipped was also crushingly boring. No doubt to combat that he sought the healing arts and seemed to spend as much time in the nurse's quarters as he did at HMS.  There were no complaints from the nurses and he stopped complaining about the crusher so either the therapy worked or he was a particularly good operator.
During his stay in Oranjemund he scripted a radio comedy based on characters in the town. It got to the stage of various readings which were hilarious. A version was eventually recorded on tape. Sadly he dropped the project at that stage and took off on his dream overseas trip. I heard from him at intervals, most of which involved beaches, red wine and the obligatory running of the bulls at Pamplona.  It all came to an end when, as he recalls, he awoke with a hangover on a beach in Spain early one morning and realized the days of wine and roses had gone on overlong.

Back home in Johannesburg he joined the Star as a junior reporter and flourished, later becoming their Gallery Columnist (a kind of political satirist) in Cape Town during the parliamentary session.  Our paths crossed a lot as I was by then a reporter for the Cape Times.

With the advent of South African television in the mid-Seventies he saw a market for script-writing and created the country's first major soapie, The Villagers, a long-running and hugely successful series. Though based on a gold-mining community it had echoes of Oranjemund. It not only brought him enough offers to enable him to take up the work fulltime, it also launched the careers of a number of actors who later went on success in both small screen and film work.

From then on his own career flourished. Before relocating to Australia Cundill was South Africa's most prolific television screenwriter. His credits totalled over 130 hours of drama, comedy and top-rating series such as THE VILLAGERS, WESTGATE, 1922, THE OUTCAST and TWO WEEKS IN PARADISE.

His first work for Australian television, the mini-series JACKAROO (produced by Crawfords), won three Logie awards. AN UNNATURAL OFFENCE (JANUS, ABC) was nominated for an AWGIE in the Best Episode Category. Episode 7 of HEARTLAND (ABC), featuring Cate Blanchett, was joint winner of the 1995 AWGIES. A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE, one of several episodes written by Cundill for the ABC's EMBASSY series, was nominated for a 1992 AFI Award. Other credits include MERCURY (ABC) featuring Geoffrey Rush, GP (ABC), LOVE IN LIMBO (feature film featuring Russell Crowe) and NEVER TELL ME NEVER (Telemovie, Palm Beach Pictures, featuring Claudia Karvan.)  He was also one of three finalists (for two years running) in the prestigious Noosa National One-Act Play Competition, winning Audience Choice last year with THE EULOGY.
Also staged to great acclaim was UNFORCED ERRORS, his trilogy of one-act plays, which takes a light-hearted look at the issues faced by the baby boomer generation now entering late middle age.

Cundill, who still has fond memories of Oranjemund, today lives with his wife, Marilla, in Maleny, a small town in the hills just north of Brisbane on the Queensland coast.  As a fellow scribbler I've often pondered the importance of the crusher in all this. Perhaps the moral is, if you want a script-writing career, spend a year watching a rock crusher. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps it was the after-hours therapy that did it.

Regards,
Bob.

[Malcolm Bertoni]

Hi Bob

I can speak from personal experience that watching ball mills go around and around, watch rocks being crushed to smithereens and watching ferro-silicon being pumped around pipes, does eventually affect one.  I often had to force myself into a daydream state to 1) pass the time, 2) ignore the noise (No earplugs in those days) and 3) stay sane.  Try doing that for a few years.  The only redeeming factor was the money going into the bank.

So naturally one thought of the strangest and often most imaginative things.  Perhaps it took me a bit longer to get the pen to paper.  This could have been due to many reasons, not least that I never really thought that anyone would want to read anything that I wrote.
Perhaps now that I'm (slightly) older I dont care too much about what people think.

Really enjoying your reminisces and tales.  Keep it up.

Malcolm

[Bob Molloy]

Hi Malcolm,
                 Intrigued by your "pen to paper" remark. Did you publish any of it, and if so where is it available?
Regards,
Bob.

[Malcolm Bertoni]

Hi Bob

I've written all about my  Oranjemund and Affen experiences in my book 'Diamonds and Dust' and have my second book which is fiction is coming out at the end of July.  Third book almost finished and should be ready early next year. 4th and 5th book in the pipeline.  Trying to make up for lost time :-)

Finding writing fun and really enjoying it.


Malcolm

[Bob Molloy]

Hi Malcolm,
                Where can I buy a copy of your book on Omund?
Regards,
Bob.

[Malcolm Bertoni]

Hi Bob

I dont know where you are.  In Aus its available at the Hobart Bookshop (hobooks@ozemail.com.au), in Cape Town from Clarkes Bookshop (books@clarkes.co.za) or you can order it online from Eqilibrium Books diriectly (http://www.equilibriumbooks.com/diamonds.htm).  Mike Alexander might have a few copies left.  I am sending him another batch in about 2 weeks.

Regards

Malcolm

[Bob Molloy]

Thanks Malcolm, I have a copy ordered fromt the Oz link.
Regards,
Bob