Sandybeach City

The following letter came from Stuart Buchanan of Rosemary Lane blog:

Dear Pip

I am delighted to hear that Coffs Harbour Council might bring all the joys of material progress and the benefits of 21st century civilisation to your sleepy backwater Sandy Beach village.

With 350 new houses and 1,400 new neighbours you will become large enough to interest the major supermarket chains in opening up branches and a car park or two in Sandy Beach. Who knows, before long you will see the main street turning into a prosperous High Street, with perhaps a shopping mall, pizza and Chinese takeaways, and of course a number of real estate agencies to sell property and investment land to all the ‘new money’ flooding into your burgeoning Sandybeachtown

From there it is but a short progressive step for the forward-looking Council to encourage the building of a striking row of spectacular Miami Beach style highrise seafront hotels with conference facilities (competition is always good for business). After the hotel chains build these, Sandy Beachtown Airport with regular flights connecting with Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo and Los Angeles. By then of course your forward-looking council will have finalised plans to dig out a proper harbour for an international yacht marina where your unused beach currently is, build a commercial quay, a kelp-processing plant by the shore, an industrial estate, and a housing estate to accommodate the influx of workers to the new light industries attracted to this new hive of industry. They will also have laid out plans for three new housing estates on the empty land overlooking the sea, an elegant, floodlit concrete shopping promenade along the new marina front and more car parks for the moneyed visitors you can expect at weekends. Prosperity will come quickly to flourishing Sandybeach City!

I look forward to the opening day of the Sandybeach City’s first ecological museum/aquarium complex next to the city’s new funfair boasting Australia’s highest and longest rollercoaster. The museum will doubtless have interesting artefacts and photographs showing from what small and uninspiring beginnings this rich metropolis sprang, and the aquarium will have tanks full of examples of the sort of marine life that once used to live along those shores before they were polluted by Sandybeach City’s sewage outflows.

It is amazing what the fusion of speculators' money and a dynamic, forward-looking Council can do to wrench a sleepy village backwater like Sandy Beach with a useless and profitless stretch of sand, out of its slumbers to place it in the forefront of booming international tourism.