Adventures and misadventures make for great stories

What's the book about?

Drawing on over seven decades of life experience spanning three continents, Views from the Southern Cross chronicles Bruce Finnemore’s life growing up in the farming community of Theunissen in the Free State where long drops were blown up, bread was baked in anthills and budgies were captured by convicts, to wreaking havoc on a ship bound for the United Kingdom in the 1950s, to the hilarities of medical school where he trained to become a dentist in the 1970s, to journeying halfway across the world to trace his family tree back hundreds of years in an effort that gained him international recognition.

Borne from a love of history, guns and the South African bushveld, and interspersed with wickedly funny pranks that began during Bruce’s childhood and extended—often backfiring—throughout his adult life, this book, painted with the vibrant hues of a true South African adventurer, storyteller and family man, will have you chuckling and shaking your head in disbelief while being propelled along dusty roads and towering grass, into sangoma’s caves and out into the cool shade of the thorn trees and Lala palms, where horned beasts rest as they attempt to escape the shimmering heat of the South African savannah, lazily flicking flies away with their tails, snorting at intruders, and looking down their noses at you as if you owed them money.

How did it come to be?

This collection of stories would never have seen the light of day were it not for the visit of Paddy and Matthew Finnegan to South Africa and Zingela. As fate would have it, their misadventures sparked a huge interest in the potential disaster that could have befallen them. Having always been adept at the art of storytelling, the opportunity to tell and retell their adventure prompted me to set it down in text, after which the exercise was partially forgotten and relegated to the backwoods of my computer. Years later, I had an adventure of my own while on an aborted hippo hunt, and, for the sake of posterity, I took the opportunity to record this story too. The unsolicited response to these two stories translated into a collection of life experiences that I felt were of a nature unlikely to be experienced by my grandchildren’s generation. And so, with a flurry of keyboard strokes I compiled a list of topics that I felt were worthy of retelling, and "Views from the Southern Cross" was born.

As with any amateur project of this nature, a stop-start period of indecision followed. The output of my tales was regulated by my social program and was of necessity relatively slow. However, as story followed story, a confidence was born that allowed me to reach the completion of this compilation. But, already I’m getting ahead of myself, and no good storyteller should do that.

In early 2018, my health took a nosedive and Motor Neurone Disease (MND) knocked on the front door. Everything that Margie and I were involved in suddenly had a new sense of urgency, including the desire to leave behind a completed text of "Views". Much to my dismay, a certain and apparently insurmountable hurdle stood in the way as my ability to use the keyboard rapidly declined.

With his eye on the goal, my son, Grant, had, unbeknown to me, been exploring the possibility of alternative assistance. His plan, which he revealed one evening, was to form a team to see the project through to completion. The idea was for me to share my thoughts on a topic, which Margie would list as a memory prompt for later. Grant would record me as I told him my story or recreation, and this would, in turn, be presented to Phillipa Mitchell, a highly-experienced ghostwriter, for final editing and structure. Phillipa saw merit in the task and accepted the commission.