The sudden newsworthiness of the platypus-infested waters of Lake Burley Griffin coincides with my doing my first lake frolicking for some years.
The Canberra Times has seized upon the quite good news of a new report Lake Burley Griffin Long-Term Trends in Water Quality with stories like this previous week's "Love our lakes: Lake Burley Griffin water is improving and it's usually safe to swim".
It emerges that while the lake's waters are presently quite harmless the National Capital Authority is disappointed by how few Canberrans ever dip a toe into them.
It's being reminisced that in the good old days of the 1980s Canberrans spent so much time in the waters of the lake that they, Canberrans, began to evolve webbed feet. Today though it is rare to see Canberrans swimming in the lake.
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The NCA's Malcolm Snow thinks this may be due to people being more risk averse because of lasting memories of when the algae-prone lake was closed for long periods.
Coincidentally, blessed with a new puppy, I have been taking him to a dog-frequented Lake Burley Griffin beach. In touch with my inner-labrador I go into the water myself to join four-legged friends in the splishing, splashing fun.
At this February moment those lake waters, so scrotum-shrivellingly chilly for much of the year, are bearably warm.
I have strong opinions about our opaque lake but first a drop of pure, clear history.
Had Canberra been conceived at a different time we might never have been given a great big lake. We might have been another riverside city (in our case beside the Molonglo), like London, say, like Paris, Dublin, Glasgow and Saint Petersburg.
But as it was all entrants in the 1911 international design competition for Australia's federal capital city were instructed that the city they imagined must boast "ornamental" waters. Fake lakes had made a big impression at Chicago's astonishing 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Our city had to have one.
But there has always been more to the lake's unpopularity (the suggested popularity of the lake in the 1980s is only fake folklore) than just a fear of its water quality.
Ours is an ocean-beach-loving nation. Inland waters can never compete with oceans' sparkling, salty, foamy blueness. Oceans' waters entice while Lake Burley Griffin's waters repel. Brindle is a fine colour for a dog but is unattractive in a lake's water.
Then, intended to be ornamental, the lake has been encouraged by planners and potentates to be only that. It has had the status of a drab watercolour in a frame on a wall. The city and the lake have been kept literally apart, with CBDs and suburbia kept well away from shores.
This disappoints well-travelled Canberrans who notice how well fun-loving cities snuggle up to their waters. I have been on a popular CBD quay in Copenhagen, enjoying waters and wharves bustling with fascinating life. Perhaps to the NCA these scenes look untidy. As administered for so long, Lake Burley Griffin has been like Yes, Minister bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Applelby's ideal hospital kept so efficient and hygienic by never admitting any patients.
But now (joy! rapture!) change is coming! The ACT government's inspired City to the Lake project promises to make the hitherto sterile West Basin area joyfully Copenhagenesque. Fogey critics accuse that the West Basin development is going to satanically "fill-in" the lake.
If only it would! The lake's intimidating, glassy vastness is one of the things that makes it so hard to love. In cities arranged beside reasonable rivers there is a sweet, bank-to-bank urban intimacy. But expanses of Lake Burley Griffin are so intimidatingly vast that the nearest shoreline seems another country.
When I come to power we will drain and shrink the lake until it has the human-sized bank-to-bank intimacy of The Thames in London, or of the Neva in Saint Petersburg.
My administration's guideline will be that a city's waterways should never be so wide that lovers on opposite banks cannot recognise and make loving "See you tonight, honey bunch!" waves to one another.