This is not one of those Canberra stories that begins with a body in Lake Burley Griffin. That might strike the reader as a shame. The lake seems like a good place for a body, as well as for a story to begin. But it only seems that way at first. In reality, the lake is too obvious a place for either. Anyone disposing of a corpse in the thing is betraying a certain lack of imagination. Anyone starting their story on the shoreline is doing something similar.
I’m not saying I don’t understand the appeal. Not of throwing a body off a bridge and hoping it doesn’t resurface overnight. I mean the appeal of starting a story there. A writer with better descriptive powers than my own—you can always count on a public servant for a lousy prose style—could make a minor set piece out of it. The rowers and the mist. Something lyrical about the trees. They could juxtapose the pre-dawn beauty of the capital with the grisly discovery of the waterlogged corpse, or else try to make some point about backstabbing by evoking the proximity of the Parliamentary Triangle.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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