On 5 March 1898, Melbourne's Argus newspaper ran a short item on a strange event that had taken place the previous day:

Casual pedestrians along the North bank of the Yarra [River] yesterday afternoon could scarcely believe their ears when they heard the pop of champagne corks and the chorus 'For he's a Jolly Good Fellow' at the Morgue.

The paper explained that 'this somewhat incongruous hilarity' was occasioned by a gathering to present Coroners Candler and Morrison with portraits of themselves. The pictures were to be hung behind the Coroner's chair, on either side of a photograph of Richard Youl, City Coroner from 1853 till his death in 1897. Attending the event were city and district pathology staff as well as some prominent medical gentlemen. Presiding over the festivities was James Edward Neild, lecturer in forensic medicine at Melbourne University, and a regular at the morgue dissecting table. Speeches were made, and toasts drunk, we are told, with 'musical honours'. Clearly, the morgue was an institution that had a sense of its own past and identity. Medical men dominated the proceedings, but there were also a number of lawyers and police present.

Compare this gathering with the incident described in a letter dated 16 February 1855 - some 43 years earlier - from 'A Jury man' to the Colonial Secretary complaining about the conduct of an inquest in which he had taken part:

an inquest was held on the body of a murdered woman, within seven yards of the Olive Branch public house, Latrobe Street East, and strange to say that the Jury had to sit in a narrow confined apartment where the awful spectacle [of the] deceased lay half naked at the feet of the Jury[.] the possition occupied by the Jury became intolerable and discusting from the long investigation and heat of the day ... why was not the usual mood addopted namely to allow the Jury to sit in a room in the adjoining Public House and then view the body as usual, hopeing you will prevent in future a repetition of such an insulting method being recurred to, if the Coroner be void of christian or humane feelings he should respect those of his sworn Jury. [sic]²

The contrast with the celebrations at the morgue is striking. First, there is no dedicated building for holding inquests: indeed, the 'Jury man' complains that even the 'usual mode' of holding inquests in hotels was not followed. Second, the inquest involves ordinary men (but not women) as jurors, who play an essential role in the decision-making process. Inquests had yet to become a predominantly medical event. Third, our 'Jury man' objects to having to look at the body because of 'christian or humane feelings'. We get a hint here of growing revulsion toward the corpse, and, although he does not mention it, his sense of unease was most likely heightened by the knowledge that the house where the inquest was held was, in fact, a brothel.³

Why then does the morgue appear during the nineteenth century and become the main site of coronial inquests within 50 years? How did Melbourne's morgue come to be positioned at the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets - at Melbourne's prime southern gateway - if only for a short time? La morgue was of course a French institution par excellence: its origins can be traced back to the fourteenth century, where in the Châtelet prisons (called basse-geôle) the morgue was a place from where gaolers viewed prisoners. By the early eighteenth century the term had come to describe the place where bodies were dumped for identification. In 1804 the Paris morgue moved to its own building at the Quai du Marché on the Ile-de-la-Cité, and after the Haussmanisation of Paris a new morgue was built in 1864 on the Quai de l'Archevêché behind Nôtre Dame. The morgue's central location attracted as many passers-by as possible for the identification of bodies, and the institution was conveniently located near the police headquarters, judicial chambers, the medical faculty of the Sorbonne, and the river from which many bodies were dragged.⁴

A dedicated morgue building - albeit temporary and dilapidated - was located in Melbourne's wharf area and used from the late 1850s as a site for storing bodies as well as for inquests. It pre-dated both the rejuvenated Paris building (1864) as well as other comparable institutions such as New York City's first morgue, opened in 1866 on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital near the East River.⁵

Nineteenth-century arguments about the morgue are a sensitive indicator of new understandings of death and its place in urban culture.⁶ Unlike cemeteries, morgues did not require large tracts of unused land, and could be placed anywhere in the city. Nor did morgues have any connection with religious practices, or have to accommodate the needs of the various denominations for their own sacred spaces. However, the morgue was a new institution, unlike the cemetery, and finding a place for it in an already allocated and overcrowded city presented a novel problem. Deciding where to put the recently deceased, and hence by what route the bodies would be taken through the city to get to the morgue, were issues created by the centralised accommodation of the dead. Like Allan Mitchell, who has written on the Paris morgue as a social institution in the nineteenth century,⁷ we argue that an understanding of the institutional history of death is necessary to ground the study of attitudes to death more generally. The construction of morgues in the nineteenth century can therefore be understood as part of new ways of dealing with death throughout the West, and as indicative of new sensitivities about public displays of bodily functions. We further argue that the construction of the Melbourne morgue makes more sense when placed in the specific context of the colonial city.⁸

In the first section we examine the calls for a morgue and the novelty of such an institution in British urban culture. Once the decision was made that there should be a house for the dead, there ensued a long drawn-out discussion about where it should be. The process was complex, and did not ultimately produce a site. We deal with this at some length in Section 2 because the very indecision underlines our main point: that the morgue was a new problem, not yet well established in the minds of administrators. Section 3 examines the temporary location that was found for the morgue in the late 1850s and 1860s following the rejection of a favoured location in what now appears to us to be a very peculiar place - the intersection of two of the city's main streets. The difficulty of understanding why a morgue was proposed for such a site is compounded by the fact that it was finally located at this spot between 1871 and 1883, as detailed in Section 4. We then discuss in Section 5 the move away from this site, first to another temporary site, then to the place that would serve as a morgue from 1888 to 1951. In the final section we point to a transitional moment at the end of the nineteenth century when the demands of science and social sensibility over sensationalism and populism began to draw the curtains around the more lurid aspects of the morgue as public spectacle.

I
When Melbourne was planned ab novo in 1837, no particular provision was made for a morgue. By the 1850s, however, the city was undergoing a transformation. The discovery of gold in 1851 led to a huge influx of immigrants. Melbourne's population of around 23,000 in 1851 tripled in just three years - and the number of deaths also increased dramatically. The earliest references to the problem of accommodating the dead appear in the minutes of the Melbourne City Council (MCC) in June 1852. The Council drew attention to the need for a morgue owing to the growing problem of large numbers of unidentified corpses about the town, and was critical of 'the present odious system of depositing dead corpses ... in houses of public accommodation, while awaiting a Coroner's Inquest'.⁹ Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, who was effectively in control of the city, responded favourably to their request, and promised to place a sum on the estimates for the erection of a morgue. It is perhaps not insignificant that publicans had some influence in the City Council - Melbourne's first mayor had indeed been a member of the fraternity.¹⁰