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2002 (c) Peninsula Community Access Newspaper Inc

 

Let's celebrate our association with Spike

 

Before I came up to live on the Coast, I was well aware of the connection between Woy Woy and Spike Milligan.

In the back of my mind, I was under the impression that he hailed from Woy Woy and that he often mentioned the town in his comedy sketches, books and film parts.

For me, Spike and Woy Woy were synonymous.

Woy Woy is a beautiful place.

The view from the railway station would have to be one of the best in the world.

The view from the wharf looking back at Gosford on a misty morning reminds me of a similar view of Lake Lucern from the ferry wharf near the Hauptbanhopf (Main station).

The town has a heart and a soul.

The soul is its residents, but unlike European villages the heart is not the railway station, although it is the busiest place in town, or the Mall, though it is the centre of commercial activity or the courthouse though it is the centre of justice.

The heart is the small white building in the middle of Woy Woy Township.

It is a symbol of democracy. We can access the world of ideas there: Marx's Das Kapital or Keyne's Wealth of Nations, Hitler's Mein Kampf, the Bible.

Children can attend a story time. Mothers can access the Internet. And we can all travel to Paris or cross the Antarctic by dog sled.

The public library defines our culture, tells the world we are not afraid of ideas, shares our thoughts, our inspirations and our images.

It is a world of literature.

It is a fitting building as it was our first Council Chambers, our first Courthouse and our first library.

It will soon be a landmark building proudly stating that Woy Woy has both beauty and culture.

As Spike was the most successful author to be related to the town, I believe it is fitting that his name be associated with the public library in some way.

Naming a bookend after him would, I am sure, given him a good laugh.

Hopefully the Council will do more than that.

Spike made Woy Woy the butt of many of his jokes.

But this did not make people hate the town. It endeared them to it.

By making it more conspicuous, it made it more important and made many of the residents even prouder to live there.

Spike Milligan was an actor, a comedian, a playwright, a cartoonist, and a writer.

He received world acclaim for what he did best: make us laugh.

Although we would like to think of ourselves as an egalitarian society, we often need people to look up to.

A boy practices his bowling so that he can one day wear the baggy green cap.

A girl practices the piano so that one day she may play at the Opera House.

There are those who write so that one day they may get a book published, write the Great Australian Novel.

Spike never wrote the Great Australian Novel. He left that to others.

He was a specialist. He wrote comedy and he did it well.

What radio show, other than the Goons, has been broadcast every Saturday for over 50 years?

Spike helped write all of the scripts.

If Spike Milligan has left us a legacy, it is not only the hundreds of books, scripts, plays and videos that he produced, it is more than that.

It is that a local boy, however tenuous the relationship, made it big in one of the toughest professions and stayed on top his whole life.

It is the hope that maybe a child in Woy Woy may one day discover Spike and his work and attempt to write something that the rest of us wants to read.

There are far too few Australian writers and even fewer that produced more than a half dozen books.

Let's celebrate Spike's successes and our association with him.

Let's keep our sense of humour, laugh at his jokes as well as our own and through him come together as a town, as a city and celebrate literature and writing in all its forms.

Alan Flores, Manager, Gosford Library