Keith Woodward will no longer grace the surface of the Austinmer ocean pool every morning like he has for most of the past 85 years.
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He had joked in 2010 about looking forward to gliding through his daily pool ritual at age 100 – which at the time was just 13 laps of the calendar away.
But the northern suburbs identity, kind, funny, and known to all and sundry as “Woody”, has, at 94, reached the end of a long innings.
This week his daughter Susan showed the Mercury some notes Woody had made about his life. One line seemed to stand out as particularly essential.
“On the same day he was discharged from the army, he joined the RSL and the Thirroul branch of the Australian Labor Party,” it read.
On the same day he was discharged from the army, he joined the RSL and the Australian Labor Party
- Keith Woodward on Keith Woodward
Keith Woodward served in the Australian army during World War II, fighting in New Guinea before returning safe to Thirroul.
He lived in the same house, on The Waves, almost his entire life. He would become almost the ideal specimen of a defining generation of Australians whose presence, as time passes, is slipping from view.
Between his family, the RSL, the ALP and the bowls club, Woody’s loves were plain to see. He was recognised with life membership to the Thirroul Bowling Club, of which he had previously served as president.
In 2013 he participated in his 67th election, handing out Labor how-to-vote cards as he had done since he was 10 – his father Bill was ALP branch president in the 1920s; Keith would hold the role decades later.
Bill Woodward’s staunch unionism was passed on and Susan was proud to say her dad was still a member of the CFMEU (he worked as a plasterer) to the day he died. When he received life membership of the ALP, former PM Bob Hawke was on hand to present it.
Perhaps less formally, he was given the one and only life membership ever created by the Austinmer Early Morning Swimmers Club.
The memory of Woody will be shared by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and also members of a northern suburbs community too numerous to count.