From these earliest calls for a morgue, the debate was couched in terms of how death should be organised in an urban space. It is worth noting in this regard that the cause was first taken up by the city corporation. The offended sensibilities of the councillors were soon championed by Melbourne Coroner, William Byam Wilmot:

In the present crowded state of the City, the danger attending the introduction of bodies perhaps in an advanced stage of decomposition into public houses for the purpose of an inquest must be obvious, and the disgraceful scene which took place on Sunday evening last when a corpse was hawked about the streets before any publican would admit it upon his premises, induces me to urge this matter upon His Excellency. There is great allowance to be made for some publicans in this matter, who have had premises licensed without the compliment of stabling and out offices prescribed by the law.¹¹

It is not surprising that Wilmot, an MD from Edinburgh and a Member of the Royal College of Physicians, pointed to the risks of the present system for spreading disease, but he did so in the context of an attempt to ensure decency. Wilmot had been Coroner for Melbourne since 1841, and his inquest load had more than doubled in the rapidly growing city: from 97 in 1850 to 262 in 1853. In 1853 he clearly considered that a morgue had become necessary, though medical arguments were to have a remarkably small place in the debate over where to put the institution.

Calls for a morgue were not the only response to the city's crisis of accommodation for the dead. The 'hawking' of the body to which Wilmot referred also drew the attention of the Argus. Unlike Wilmot, the Argus thought the solution was to withhold licenses from, or at least fine, publicans who refused to take a body, to ensure that this situation did not occur in future. The Argus was certain that this power existed in England, but was unsure of the colonial situation.¹² The legal position in the colony remained unclear until 1864 when publicans were specifically required to house dead bodies for post-mortems, for which they received one pound.¹³ Whatever the letter of the law in 1853, however, the practice of holding inquests in hotels was common, and accepted as the proper practice, as the protest from the Argus suggests. Approval of this practice is also clear in the letter from 'A Jury man' quoted above. Crawford Mollison, Melbourne's premier pathologist at the end of the nineteenth century, recalled that before the erection of the 1888 morgue, 'post-mortems were made in stables and barns, and inquests were held in hotels'.¹⁴ Mollison slightly overstates the practice to the extent that inquest records from the 1850s list bodies being stored in a range of mortuaries; for example, gaols were used for inquests on prisoners who died in custody as well as those who were executed, and inquests were held in lunatic asylums, the Immigrants Home and the Melbourne Hospital on those who died in these institutions.¹⁵ The common practice of keeping bodies in hotels was, however, an accepted cultural norm of the British city in the mid-nineteenth century.

The novelty of the morgue in British culture can be measured against the primacy of the Paris morgue as a sine qua non of civil surveillance. The keystone of the French morgue was public display to maximise the likelihood of identifying the dead, and the central location of the Paris morgue was designed to attract many passers-by. But more than that, the Paris morgue was 'La Musée de la Mort', a morbid attraction listed in guide books to the city as a must-see alongside the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the waxworks and the theatre.¹⁶ It has been estimated that a million visitors a year passed through the morgue by the end of the century. While as a place of banal curiosity the Paris morgue may have been the 'Luxembourg de la Cité', French commentators noted ironically that its clientele comprised mostly English tourists. Not content with the offerings of the Salle d'exposition, they would, if they could, go over the place with a fine-tooth comb.¹⁷ In 1833 F de Courcy commented that now that well-known people were no longer executed on the Place de la Grève, it could only be hoped that onlookers would not be deprived of the stocks, as the morgue would then be the only place of comparable recreation left.¹⁸ Changing ideas of decency through the nineteenth century eventually put an end to this display of death. Bodies were no longer displayed naked at the Paris morgue from 1877, and public exhibition of bodies was ended in 1907.¹⁹

The French example was certainly not lost on those in Melbourne. In 1868, Chief Commissioner of Police Standish noted that 'the Morgue in Paris is now the most complete structure of the kind, and should the Officers entrusted with the erection of the new Morgue in Melbourne require details of that building I shall be happy to procure them from the Parisian authorities'.²⁰ Not everyone was so happy about following the French example. The Age newspaper regarded the French morgue as 'one of the dismal sights of Paris' and claimed it was 'a gloomy emanation from the morbid sentimentality of the French mind'.²¹ While the Age identified some crucial differences between British and French culture and judicial systems, it somewhat overstated the case. A body could only be identified at inquest when someone could testify to the identity. Some of the early calls for a morgue addressed this very problem by insisting that identification was a key function that the morgue would play. Coroner Youl, who took over from Wilmot temporarily in 1854 and permanently in 1857, emphasised the importance of having a central place where people might look for 'persons, who in a state of Delirium wander from their homes and are found by the Police'. Public houses failed to provide this central point for identification. Similarly, the Mayor called for 'a morgue or dead-house for the reception of dead bodies awaiting Coroners Inquests or recognition by their friends'.²²

The extent to which colonists took 'advantage' of the number of unidentified corpses to view the dead as spectacle, as was the case in Paris, is unclear for the 1860s and 1870s, although as discussed below there were moments later in the century when this certainly occurred. It is clear however that the call for a morgue was partly a response to the desire of the government to be able to identify the deceased in a society of immigrant strangers, and partly a requirement of the climate. Traditional practices, rooted in localism, were inefficient in a growing colonial society with hot summers.²³ The surveillance of the dead was common in French and English societies, but was given particular emphasis in a town experiencing a gold-rush population boom.²⁴ Identification, decency and health, therefore, provided varying motivation for this radical departure from local English practice.

II
Once the idea of a morgue was accepted, the problem became where to put it. A morgue ensured that bodies were not stored in public houses. But at the same time it also meant creating a location where bodies would always be present, and to where bodies would have to be carried, concentrating the visibility of death in the streets. Choosing a site meant carefully considering each of these possibilities.

The large proportion of bodies for inquest retrieved from the Yarra led to various officials suggesting sites near the river. Public propriety, which had begun the debate, was also influencing the location of the morgue. Wilmot considered a site in the immediate vicinity of Prince's Bridge to be the most appropriate, close to the river. He pointed out that it had a number of other advantages as well, being nearer the Swanston Street police station and the wharf, 'more especially when we consider how great a desideratum it is that the Streets of the City should be harassed as little as possible by the dead bodies found in such various stages of decomposition'.²⁵ Lieutenant-Governor La Trobe, who had the ultimate authority over where public buildings were to go, reacted with cautious approval to this proposal, so long as the morgue was not 'made a prominent object in any position'. To this end, he suggested embedding the morgue in the embankment of Prince's Bridge. Colonial Architect Henry Ginn was not so sure about La Trobe's idea, both on account of its expense and on the grounds that 'many females would be much shocked at having to pass over a place where dead bodies are kept'.²⁶ The emergent ideology of public space as a reformed, sanitised and generally accessible and democratic domain, open in theory to all the city's denizens, was compromised in practice by complex manipulations of behaviour and locations that demanded conformity to particular notions of convenience and propriety.²⁷