Historic farms of South Africa : the wool, the wheat and the wine of the 17 th and 18 th centuries / Dorothea Fairbridge
In the seventeenth century of which Miss Fairbridge wrote in this, the last volume which will appear under her name, it was not uncommon for the Printer to address the Reader. My own excuse in adding these few words to this book is the excuse of intimate friendship which covered a period of some fourteen years, which allowed me to watch, often at a distance., Miss Fairbridge at work, and which has in the end honoured me by making me her literary executor. Miss Fairbridge was what her books are. She was the most indomitable of women having all the magnanimity of outlook which is born in big spaces. Moreover her passionate love of the country in which she was born added force to her natural courage and gave also that sense of almost overwhelming spontaneity to the picturesque detail and sincerity to the background of her work. Few people know that she had already received the warning of what was destined in the end to prove fatal, before she undertook the journey she called "The Pilgrim' way in South Africa" In the book which came of it and which bore that name, there is not a sign of failing powers. On the contrary the dominant note is the exhilaration of the surroundings through which she passed ; her call of faith in South Africa was never clearer. The Pilgrams' Way was in a sense the sequel of Historic Houses of South Africa, and in that same sense this posthumous volume Historic Farms of South Africa is the continuation of both of them. I know she would wish it so to be regarded All those who read it in South Africa will realize that in this volume the central point is the personality of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, the Cape Governor of 1700, who was the object of a determined conspiracy on the part of Adam Tas, Huysing, and other burghers of the day. It will not be forgotten that it quicken interest in him and did much to remove the slur that had lain on his career in history. For her devotion to South Africa was ever quick to discover romance everywhere, but her keen historical sense was as sure never to pervert it. Van der Stel was and is the central point of the book, but gradually Miss Fairbridge's interest in the writing of it grew outwards until in the end she rechristened it with the title which it bears. Had she lived the last signs of this change of scopes would have disappeared. As it is, if readers sometimes think the title a little too large for the book, they will remember what I now tell them and will see in it not a fault but only another sign of the expansiveness and wholeheartedness of the author. John Johnson 7 Oct 1931
Source : Historic Farms of South Africa : the wool, the wheat and the wine of the 17 th and 18 th centuries / Dorothea Fairbridge
