SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian man kept his wife's body in a drum container at the family home for 23 years after pretending she had run off with another man, prosecutors said Thursday.

Frederick William Boyle, 58, of the Melbourne suburb of Carrum Downs, faces a charge of murder, which he denies.

Boyle is alleged to have shot his wife Edwina Boyle in the head, dismembered her and hid her body.

"He put her body in a 44-gallon drum and kept it for 20 years," prosecutor Gavin Silbert told the Victorian Supreme Court on the first day of the trial.

Edwina Boyle disappeared in October 1983, Silbert told the court, and Boyle claimed at the time she had run off with a truck driver called Ray.

He did not report her missing and informed relatives in England not to be surprised if they did not hear from her at Christmas that year.

But in 2006, while cleaning up, his son-in-law decided to cut open a drum kept at the family home for many years. Prosecutors said he had asked for 14 years what was in the drum and had been told it contained glue for carpet laying.

Silbert said the son-in-law found a hessian bag containing a skull, a leg bone and part of a pelvis inside. The bones were later identified as those of Edwina Boyle, and a post-mortem showed she died of a bullet wound to the head.

The trial continues.