A quiet backwater

ravelers with off-world experience will love this planet. Stable and free enough to support unencumbered observation - enlightened and funny enough to keep boredom at bay.

The comical small-town politics of tiny nations is food for the funny bone. Short, belligerent leaders strut the world stage, racial insensitivity and cultural belligerence all but printed on receding foreheads, hairline symbolic of career.

Leaders of larger legions are little smarter than their furtive, whispering ideologues. Delightful (refreshing?) to see intelligent, powerful people beach their unassailable ships of state on shoals of arrant stupidity.

Short life spans and hectic agendas probably to blame, the old chestnut is alive and well on yet another globular domain: "power corrupts, arrogance blinds" (translation lacks elegance of our original).

Families, like governments, are similarly dysfunctional as members assume disproportionate self-importance. Villages, towns, cities, states and nations succumb to selfish, greedy buffoons, humility an elusive quality in these competitive, paranoid cultures.

Irony is a universal constant of sentience, it seems. Here, too, the "public service" oxymoron thrives.

Kind parents, the people in this fair, sunny city are a microcosm of the nation, itself representative of the global community.

This Newcastle, one of fifty three so-named communities on the planet, is indeed a place to grow and die in eternal obscurity, intoxicated, as by a tropical island or a balmy ale, one might quickly lose the will to leave this serene paradise.

Sublime dusky evenings at beaches, restaurants and theaters by the water; invigorating, crisp, dew-laden mornings immersed in untainted wilderness. Seduction! Recumbent in the golden-orange sun this ancient brown continent sleepily ages, seducing aborigine and immigrant to its timeless ways.

Should I awaken not knowing you, dear fond Parents, I would be a blest and contented native.

With Respect and Love
Your Beloved Son