Australian
Screen

Clip description

In a dramatic re-creation of events of 1 January 1963, two boys find the body of Dr Bogle (Rhys Muldoon) beside Lane Cove River. Police and detectives arrive at the scene to discover Mrs Chandler’s (Octavia Baron Martin) half-naked body nearby. In a contemporary interview, journalist Gerald Stone says the Bogle-Chandler mystery was 'by far the biggest crime case’ in Australia to that time. This clip features narration by Hugo Weaving.

Curator’s notes

This is one of the best pre-title sequences in any history documentary I’ve seen. It establishes that this is based on a true story, that it is an unsolved mystery involving sex and death, and visually intrigues with stylised re-creations. The music is atmospheric. The combined effect of slow-motion visuals, the period setting, and the haunting music is to draw us into the film with the promise that we will be voyeuristically satisfied.

The sequence also adds a sense of proportion with the grab from Gerald Stone, a journalist at the time, describing the deaths as perhaps the ‘biggest crime case’ of that time and the narrator’s voice telling us ‘there were no clues’. So the film presents us with an unsolved crime and, like all good crime stories, gets us to wonder ‘whodunnit’. Given that this story has been around for 40 years and that most people switch channels after 30 seconds if a film doesn’t grab them, the filmmakers have done a brilliant job of setting us up to keep watching.