IV
The temporary morgues had not met the demand for a city morgue, and the Prince's Bridge site rejected in 1854 again became the focus of attention. In September 1869 the Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands suggested a new site on the south bank of the Yarra west of Prince's Bridge, and by 1870 there was a clear indication that moves were again afoot to build a new morgue. Significantly, however, the Age viewed the delay with a certain amount of pleasure, and it is clear that there was still some opposition to the very institution of the morgue itself.

Finding a suitable location was again a difficult task. Many of the issues in 1871 were the same as those in the 1850s. Despite this, the outcome was the opposite of that of 20 years earlier: the Melbourne morgue ended up at Prince's Bridge, at the city's southern entrance. This site was favoured by the Argus over other locations that were deemed to be even more noticeable.⁴⁰ The building was completed in 1871, and from JE Neild's sketch-plan in 1878 it appears that the Prince's Bridge morgue was attached to the original 1854 office.

Centralisation was slow to take effect. Even after the central morgue was established in the city, bodies were still being taken to local hotels for inquest. In 1876 attention was drawn in Parliament to an incident where a suicide's body was taken to a hotel in North Melbourne, the state of decomposition driving customers away from the premises.⁴¹ This case drew attention to the problems of grafting new sensibilities onto existing legal structures. The Coroner was still an office based on local participation. There was also new concern about the propriety of having the morgue in such a prominent position. The dilapidated state of the morgue by 1878 induced Coroner Candler to suggest that 'that the place should be made far more presentable than it is - more creditable to the City of Melbourne - and more fitted for its purpose'.⁴²

In a sense this signals a new era of civic consciousness in relation to the public image of the city. Plans in the late 1870s for a new Prince's Bridge culminated in 1888 with the opening of the new structure. By 1900 the site was firmly identified as the city's gateway from St Kilda Road,⁴³ and improvements after 1901 were motivated by the opening of Federal Parliament in Melbourne, a Royal Visit, and the visit of the American Fleet in 1908. By this time, the MCC and the Government had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds on the new railway station and on statues, lawns and flower beds at the city's southern entrance in an effort, as the Age would have it, 'to make this spot - the city's front door - a credit to Melbourne'.⁴⁴

V
The Prince's Bridge morgue was abandoned by the Coroners in 1883 when the Railway Department required the old building.⁴⁵ A temporary morgue was located in a yard at Cole's wharf, but within twelve months Youl condemned the building as hopeless: 'The dead house is so infected with rats that the bodies have to be protected from them with iron covers. The jury room is cold dark and very uncomfortable so much so that jurors refuse to sit in it and the Court has to be removed to [a] Hotel'.⁴⁶ The Secretary of the Crown Law Office was more direct: 'The present disgusting place is enough to kill people [who have to] go there and perform duties in the place.'⁴⁷

While the temporary site was miserably inadequate, no agreement could be reached on a permanent location. The Railway Department and the Secretary for Public Works suggested sites near the wharves, Youl objecting to such proposals on the grounds that this precinct was too far away from the centre of population, that juries would need to be transported in cabs and paid for their time and trouble, and that bodies would have to be carried through the town.

The morgue had finally become an important and often-used building, highlighting the problems of centralising the storage of the dead. In 1885, Solicitor-General Alfred Deakin told Parliament that a central and convenient location could not yet be fixed upon, four proposed sites having been objected to.⁴⁸ The MCC and others rejected any site that would be objectionable to the citizens of Melbourne: 'surely the views of the living must be regarded as well as the sentimental view put forward by Dr. Youl or any one else'.⁴⁹ Deakin observed that the City Council objected to many sites 'which they considered would be disfigured by the erection of a morgue; they were opposed to a building of the kind, from its associations, no matter how architecturally perfect it might be, occupying a public position'.⁵⁰ Having championed the removal of the dead from city hotels in the 1850s, the Council now objected to death in the city per se. Nevertheless, this debate seems to have inspired some action, and on 2 September 1886 Youl approved a site just outside the city proper, on the banks of the Yarra at Batman Avenue. The new morgue was opened in 1888, and served as the City Morgue until 1951 when the institution was moved first to the Flinders Street extension, and finally in 1988 to premises in Kavanagh Street, Southbank.