Sorry i never replied your previous message. I'm based in Hong Kong.
If you send this via the embassy or canadian office in south africa, I think the chance of the application being lost is not high. Did you ever write to the high commission of canada in south africa?
I had the same problem in the beginning, no update, no AOR. I wrote to the general consulate of Canada in HK, and they serve as the middle person to contact IRCC, and they sent me a good reply saying that my application is in the waiting line, and basically they were processing still the applications from X month, so yours should be opened by Y month, it ended up being opened 1 month later than their date, so it was not too bad...
What I gathered is that after your application arrived at CPC Sydney, a case processing officer will open your application and put into the system, so the agents could process your case.
There are apparently very few case processing officers, so there's simply a long queue of arriving applications waiting to be opened. Same for the situation with the case agents.
My application is still pending at "Decision Made" now, I hope they could print the certificate and mail this back to me soon.
But so far my experience is that – it's really slow, but once your case is in the system, and that your application is completed (if you submitted to the high commission of canada they must ensure your application is completed), then there is no reason you'll not get an update.
Hope this information will help you.