A new age for the Victorian village on the edge of the universe

Daily Maverick

02-05-2025

The widening of the N1 at Matjiesfontein is evidence of space-age change coming to the old Victorian village. Life on 'the other side of the tracks' may never be the same again. Meanwhile, the lamb chops across the road are as good as ever.
The other side of Matjiesfontein comes into focus when you interview Head Chef Craig Paulse and get an insight into how different life must be across the tracks. The people of the town — Craig calls them 'Matjietarians' — who live in those houses visitors see when they check into the Lord Milner Hotel across the road in 'Matjiesfontein village'.
Johnny Theunissen grew up here. When we first visited in the Eighties, he was a laaitie. At the age of 16, he blew the bugle in the street outside the Laird's Arms pub, enticing guests to board the London bus for the 10-minute tour (if that) of the town.
Johnny died in March 2024 after decades of conducting the bus tours and playing honkytonk in the pub, his bowler hat on the piano to collect tips.
The faces of the hotel staff are so familiar to me; some have been there for 30, 40 years or more. Johnny Theunissen is not there, but wine steward Gert Visser is now a veteran, having been a teenager when we first encountered him, and getting a greeting from Jessica Minnies, Chantal Sass and other stalwarts is part of the welcome back.
Maria van Schalkwyk still smiles her warm smile and looks so young that I thought she was the identical daughter of the woman who first gave me an extra lamb chop all those decades ago. (It's a tradition, sorry.) But no, she said recently: 'It was always me.' And not a day older.
But over there, across the road, these are people with their own lives, out of sight of the hotel and its guests. It's not for us to pry; their private lives are not our business. But we know that Johnny Theunissen was their lay preacher, a pillar of that community. When he departed, he was mourned on that side of the tracks more as an elder than as the entertainment manager for the hotel.
Chef Craig Paulse, who has been chef at Matjiesfontein for seven years, arrived in town from Parow, Cape Town after 11 years in the kitchen at the Portswood Hotel on the edges of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. I met him briefly when dining there somewhere around 2009.
In between, for three years he was based at the Karoo1 Hotel between De Doorns and Touws River on the Matjiesfontein end of the Hex River Pass. Along the way, he also worked at Mediclinics to 'standardise the menus'.
If, when first arriving at Matjiesfontein, he may have thought his tenure here would be short, now he says, 'This place grabs you and keeps you here. I knew nothing about Matjiesfontein. I've learnt a lot.'
He still owns his home back in Cape Town. 'I'm a Parow North guy,' he says. But others before him have arrived expecting to leave eventually, and there is something about Matjies that 'keeps you' there. It's the same thing that has kept my family going back again and again, more than 100 times by now (I'd estimate closer to 140), since our first visit circa 1982. Our daughter has known Matjies all her life; she got married there. Now our grandkids know it. It grabs hold of you. Maybe Jeremy, now 6, or Aubrey Rose, nearly 2, will marry there one day and Chef Craig will devise the menu — and maybe Matjiesfontein will decide how long he will stay here.
The town, meanwhile, is in the middle of a seismic shift of change such as it has not seen since that first visit — or since the nearby national road was first tarred.
The South African National Space Agency (Sansa) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) in the USA were in discussions as long ago as 2014 about 'the potential for a deep space complex in South Africa', according to the Sansa website. Matjiesfontein was ultimately chosen as 'the optimal location that fulfilled all the necessary requirements for setting up a new ground station'.
According to Sansa, the Matjiesfontein site 'will form part of the new Nasa Lunar Exploration Ground Segment (Legs) network of three sites in the United States of America, South Africa and Australia.
'As the third site, it will complement the other two sites and provide improved coverage and redundancy for critical mission support. The Legs mission is to provide direct-to-Earth communication and navigation services for missions operating from 36,000 kilometres (km) in the GEO to cis Lunar and other orbits out to 2 Million km.'
And all of this in Matjiesfontein, where nothing has changed much since hotelier David Rawdon bought the place in the late Sixties and gave it the new lease of life that continues to this day. Before that, the village had been in neglectful disrepair as cars whizzed by on the N1, oblivious of its history.
And now the community of Matjiesfontein will be a part of a Nasa/Sansa space programme. Consider what this will mean for this quiet little enclave where nobody has ever expected much, and the lucky few who have landed a job at the hotel across the railway tracks, with some young people leaving for the city. But again, Matjiesfontein has a magnetic pull for these people too, and not all respond to the lure of money to be made in the cities.
As someone from the city who prefers to be in this village as often as possible, I have a keen appreciation of what this magnetism feels like and how irresistible it is.
And chef Craig Paulse has some of the numbers. There are 721 Matjietarians in the village, he tells me. 'When I started it was 661.'
Of these, 60 work in hospitality at the hotel across the road. On busy nights, they take on up to 15 more 'casuals'.
Sansa has engaged with the community, and there are employment opportunities, most or all of which are likely to be menial. If it would be naive to hope that these opportunities might include actual work on the space projects the facility is designed for, it's the young people of the town who might expect, or hope, to be a part of the scientific work that lies ahead.
The Sansa site shares this of its meeting with the local community: 'Sansa actively engaged with the community, addressing concerns about its hiring processes, job accessibility, and tender advertisements. The Agency emphasised its dedication to partnering with the community, even as it progresses towards establishing Africa's pioneering deep space ground station.
'Following the main event, a science engagement session was hosted by the Sansa science engagement team. This session specifically targeted primary and high school learners, aiming to spark their interest in science and space-related topics. The science engagement session proved to be a hit among the younger audience, attracting 110 learners and children. ' (My italics.)
Craig says that the community believes that the heritage of their village opposite the hotel will not be affected directly by the Sansa/Nasa facility further out of the town, where there will also be a visitors' centre.
This means that Matjiesfontein will get a second attraction with which to lure tourists, and logically the hotel will benefit too as people check in to explore the vintage charms of the famous hotel resort — once a spa for rich visitors from Europe — as well as the new deep space complex.
Also set to benefit is Sutherland, 110km away, where the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) is located. The SKA-Mid Array in the vicinity of Carnarvon, Northern Cape, could arguably be the third leg of a future Karoo space route.
Which brings us to another thought: when projects such as these occur, there is always talk of the boon that it will be for the nearby town. In Sutherland, there has been a fair degree of tourism sparked by the SAAO. But, two years of living in the town and operating a restaurant there taught us that, while the local eateries do benefit from tourists coming to town, visits by those who work at the facility were as rare as pulsar planets.
Recently I pulled into Carnarvon at lunch time, hungry and in need of a break before the next 115km stretch to Williston and the further 115km to Calvinia beyond that.
The shop at the petrol station was shut — not closed for lunch, shut completely. The Lord Carnarvon 'small hotel' as it calls itself was locked and bolted. I drove around the town looking for somewhere, anywhere, that I could get a sandwich, a pie, something. The Spar, surely? Nope, that was closed too. So not even a chocolate or a bag of crisps.
I drove back to the petrol station and spoke to the man.
' Is daar g'n plek in die dorp waar 'n man iets kan kry om te eet? '
' Nee, meneer. '
' Niks? … Absoluut niks? '
' Fokol, meneer. '
If there is any evidence that the SKA Mid-Array has given a fillip to the dorp, I did not see anything that could support this hope. Businesses shut, hotels closed, shopfronts neglected, ragged people traipsing here and there.
It was a Saturday, by the way, in case you thought it sounded like Sunday. It sure felt like a Sunday.
But Matjiesfontein is not that kind of a Karoo dorp, it is like nowhere else on Earth. We can hope that its distinctive nature, its pulsar-planet-rare character and structural makeup, will enable it to engage with a new future.
In the meantime, life continues as normal at the Lord Milner, and on the evening of this past visit, after I spent time at a corner table of the lovely old dining room chatting to Craig Paulse, it was time for dinner at a table next to the fireplace, and lamb chops again, perfect tjoppies, as good as you could hope for.
And the Double Decker, a two-tier chocolate mousse, white and dark, made in honour of the London bus that grinds its way around the town each evening at 6pm.
I can always tell the difference between a chef who loves his craft and one who's just doing a job. Everything on the current menu is a Craig Paulse dish, and it's all perfectly thought out, prepared and cooked; you can see it and taste it on the plate. And this particular post requires a fair degree of tradition. The traditions and the expectations that come with them run deep.
One dish I have never been sure about is the roast pork belly starter, which just does not work as a prelude to a main course. It's pretty much a meal in its own right. That's one slot on the menu that the chef might like to fill with, say, a rotating selection of inventive starters.
Perhaps an innovative interpretation of the chicken liver pâté with melba toast that was on the menu for decades. On the Matjiesfontein village website, chef Craig shares his love for five particular ingredients: coriander, chilli, olive oil, garlic and cassia. The last choice is interesting — cassia (sometimes called 'stick cinnamon' at the Cape) is common to Cape Malay cuisine, more so than actual cinnamon, its close cousin.
And maybe we could have the Hot Logan Soup back in some form, winter being around the corner… or just call the soup of the day that.
Craig is known to have a passion for Indian food, which prompts this thought or suggestion: curry is a part of the Karoo food tradition too, and 'Chef Craig's curry of the day (or week)' would be an excellent addition to the Matjies menu.
I'll order it when next I'm there, chef. 🙂 DM