Andrew Inglis Clark was getting ready for his yearly bath when we visited him on Friday.
He's been towering - literally, at 4.8 metres - over this corner of Constitution Avenue and London Circuit for six years now, and his weathered steel and swinging coat need a good clean every now and again.
But the blokes hired to train high-pressure hoses on him were more than happy to move out of the way while we captured constitutional lawyer Kim Rubenstein posing in front of the great man.
Five years ago, we captured an almost identical photo of Professor Rubenstein in front of the same statue, and both times, the story hasn't been about him at all.
It's about the woman she thinks should be similarly immortalised on the opposite side of the street.
She's been lobbying ever since for a statue of Catherine Helen Spence, Australia's first female political candidate who unsuccessfully ran for the federal convention, held in Adelaide.
It's part of a wider campaign to see more women memorialised in Australia's cities.
Professor Rubenstein has now secured in-principle support for the project from the National Capital Authority and the City Renewal Authority, and now needs to raise the funds - about $650,000 - to make it happen.
She said Spence, who was born in 1825 and died in 1910, had been a "political junkie" with wide and varied interests.
The Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as a "writer, preacher, reformer and feminist", and "an enthusiast for electoral reform".
But more importantly, she had travelled to meet British lawyer and electoral reformer Thomas Hare while on holiday in Britain in 1864.
He was credited with inventing the single transferable vote system of proportional representation.
"When she came back, she sort of adapted it for Australia, and then Andrew Inglis Clark got voted in to go to the constitutional convention, and she didn't," Professor Rubenstein said.
"So the system of proportional representation that everyone refers to as the 'Hare-Clark system' really should be the 'Hare-Spence system'."
When the statue of Andrew Inglis Clark, created by artist April Pine and commissioned by Capital Property Group, was installed on London Circuit, she thought the job was only half done.
"I just thought at the time, how brilliant would it be to have an equivalent sculpture of her opposite him, with a plaque saying she was the person who brought it to Australia, it's really the Hare-Spence system? Even though it's often attributed to the fellow across the road, and he had a role to play."
At around the same time, she became involved in the community campaign A Monument of One's Own, set up to smash the "bronze ceiling" by fighting for gender equality in public monuments and statues across Australia.
"Basically, we're going to start a big campaign as a fundraiser, and the National Foundation for Australian Women are auspicing A Monument of One's Own to raise funds to create this sculpture," she said.
"The first step is raising funds to be able to pay artists to put in submissions.
"But what I think we're going to do is set up ... a selection committee to choose, and we'll put out an expression of interest that we're going to ask artists to say that if they're interested, and then choose four of them, and the first lot of funds will pay the first four to come up with their model."
Professor Rubenstein will announce the fundraising campaign at a panel discussion on writing, postcolonialism and memory at the University of Canberra on Wednesday evening.
