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Publications & Reports

Bleek reports that authorities are at an impasse, unable to increase taxation or meaningfully reduce expenditure without harming the public good. There is a considerable debt which will increasingly augment future spending. Hopefully, the colony's situation will shift and allow for fewer loans as it attempts to cover its debts and pursues financial self-sufficiency by developing all profitable resources. The government's administrative branch is under-using resources like forests and open land. He cites the unapplied, vacant Cape Flats as an example, overseen by a Superintendent of White Sands Plantations who ought to apply themselves to the area's improvement. No human assistance is provided to this conservator, making their impact minimal and unlikely to increase the Cape District's resources soon. Colonel Hill, both Magistrate and Civil Commissioner of Cape Town, the wealthiest and most populous district, is too busy to burden further. Unrelatedly, rotten Cape affairs see incompetent superiors over-deligating critical tasks to their non-vested or unelected subordinates. Over-deligating leads to general inefficacy as clerks and secretaries manage unwieldy things unconfidently. Department heads need the know-how to complement their authority and must fend off stagnation by aspiring toward progress. The affairs of Civil Commissioners and Magistrates require separating, despite the cost. Magistrates need not be so numerous as seen in the Winelands. Extending a civil commissioner's jurisdiction becomes tenable when separated from magisterial duties.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

05/07/1866

Two cut out columns of newsprint text, positioned vertically parallel, pasted onto a plus-sized A4 unlined sheet with visible warping. No title was subsequently handwritten onto the mount/paper backing. The bottom-right section of text concerning Kotzé, after the section break, is likely not by Bleek and has been struck through.

The "White Sands" would become known as Uitvlugt, a site of drift sand experimentation, which now comprises the presentday areas of Pinelands, Ndabeni, and Langa (Ferrar, Kruger, & Macdonald, 1986: 40; Forth, 2017: 21). The Cape Flats, a vast sheet of aeolian sand some 400 square kilometers in extent, is the isthmus -- that separates Table Bay, to the north-west, from False Bay, to the south-east -- connecting the Cape Peninsula to the mainland (Taylor, 1972: 637). Despite Joseph Storr Lister (1852-1927), credited with the creation of the Tokai arboretum and (pine) plantation in 1885, rarely being named as the first Superintendent of the White Sands Plantation (which refers almost exclusively to the old Uitvlugt farm [in 1875]) and/or Superintendent of Plantations (1875-1888)/Superintendent of Drift Sands Plantations (used more generally?) -- no earlier occupants of that post appear forthcoming (Bennett & Kruger, 2015: 42-43). Count Médéric de Vasselot de Regné's, sometimes "Régné", appointment in 1880 as the fist Superintendent of Woods and Forests is a different, synergistic posting in which he superintended the colony's forests and plantations department with the assistance of J Storr Lister, who established (in 1876) and ran the department before leaving briefly for India and England, and DE Hutchins (and their transplanted containerised nursery system), commercialising the latters' plantations (Barton, 2002: 99; Southern African Institute of Forestry, 2009: 110; Queiroz & Pooley, 2018: 220-221). Storr Lister (and Hutchins) were also responsible for greening presentday Pinelands and parts of the Southern Suburbs with exotic vegetation.