Oh! Darling..
Visiting the State archives on Roeland St, we find our way through the many keys and locks to a bare room with empty desks and piles of brown cardboard boxes. Eventually we suss the form filling system and order up documents, pertaining to our great-grandfather Woolf Beinart and his business interests. We hit a goldmine: the Darling Salt Pans and Produce Company, Ltd., was evidentially a going concern circa 1929 and there are a multitude of polite letters back and forward in his scratchy handwriting on headed paper, assuring the planning department of the hygienic nature of skin-preserving. We also find a blueprint for a railway siding at Kikoesvlei, near Darling, where he had his salt stores…
So on Saturday we set off to Darling, and firstly visit the Darling Museum, home of South Africa’s foremost Butter-making artefact collection. There we find more evidence of Beinarts in the area, as there was a Beinart tailors in Darlings’ early days. From Darling we head north down a dirt track to Kikoesvlei, which consists of a railway siding and a sign. We look for evidence but find nothing, and so we head to the nearby farm. The farmer turns out to know the local history, and takes us to the site where he says the salt stores were, in his 4 x 4, past the Ostrich farm. There we find some remains of foundations, and a house on a pole, which he says is an owl house. They encourage the owls to live there to eat the mice that eat the wheat. Organic pest control.
Then we drive past a huge dairy farm (not so organic) to Koekiespan, another farm, and the site of a salt pan. It is an eerie, uncanny place, a vast stretch of white emptiness under the blue sky. You walk onto it and it feels like desert, but also like ice, and you feel it could give way at any moment. I take photographs and the light is blinding. I feel a bit like I have landed on the moon.
We collect the salt and add to our collection of envelopes, started with salt from the decks of the ships where sea-water has pooled and evaporated, leaving white crystals in patterns on the green paintwork.
Katy Beinart
