VI
Public viewing of bodies was at least as important in colonial Melbourne as it was in Paris. Victoria was an immigrant society, attempting to recreate the social bonds of 'home'. But while for some of its nineteenth-century history the Melbourne morgue was a centrally located and public institution (despite the reservations shown by various officials about its prominent position), there is little evidence that the general public flocked to the Melbourne morgue as they did in Paris, as a source of titillation and amusement. Certainly by the early twentieth century such a practice was seen to degrade the spectacle of death and to provoke vice and immorality. Charlady Mrs Prendegast, for example, was aghast in 1875 to find the door of the Morgue left ajar, and a corpse 'on the slab in the centre of the Morgue ... so that any person having occasion to enter the yard would have a full view'.⁵¹ Her reaction suggests just how important it had become to keep bodies out of view. Constable Hoey promised to remedy the situation with a sign on the morgue reminding police to close the door. This attitude was consistent with the abolition of Public Execution in 1856, after which only people approved by a Justice of the Peace were allowed to view the bodies of executed felons. Of course, some members of the public must have come to the morgue to aid identification of bodies, and journalists attended the morgue to write up inquests for their newspapers. In 1878 Dr Neild reported for the information of the City and District Coroner requirements at Melbourne Morgue for the enforcement of regulations 'whereby the public should not be admitted to the dead-house while a body is being examined'. This again indicates that there was some degree of public display.

There is however some evidence to show a peak in public interest in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In 1886 it was reported in the Victorian Parliament that 'a number of the public frequently visited the place for the purpose of identifying bodies which might be conveyed thither; and it was a stigma on the present enlightened age for it to be possible that those bodies should be liable to be mutilated by vermin'.⁵² The Hon. LL Smith, medical practitioner, also suggested that the proposed morgue

should contain suitable accommodation for post mortem examinations, and for the holding of inquests, and that it should be arranged after the mode adopted in continental cities, whereby the public were enabled to view the cadavres, decently laid out, through glass plates - a proceeding which often assisted in the discovery of crime.⁵³

In 1892 a story in the Bulletin entitled 'They met at the Morgue' had two friends making for the morgue after taking their lunch, to flatten their noses against the screen of glass and take in the most recent load of 'wrecked humanity'.⁵⁴

In the case of at least one notorious crime, there is also clear evidence that Melburnians did indeed flock to the morgue like their Parisian counterparts. The 'Yarra Boot Trunk Tragedy' was one of the names given to the discovery of the naked corpse of an unidentified young woman in a yellow box floating in the Yarra at South Richmond on 17 December 1898. Initially, people wishing to view the body claimed to be looking for missing friends; later, police gave in to public curiosity in the hope (correct, as it turned out) that someone would be able to identify the body. Crowds continued to gather after police removed and preserved her head, allowing her decomposing body to be buried, and the public entertainment was celebrated in verse as 'The Ballad of the Melbourne Morgue':

Do come an' see the 'Ead
Of the donah [woman] who is dead;
It lies upon a marble slab
In a buildin', you're aware,
By the Yarra over there -
Suppose we take a four-wheel cab;
For the cab can carry eight,
And will land us at the gate
Of the villa where the gal's on view;
Thought we can't say who she is
From the photos. of her phiz.,
Thank Gawd! she wasn't me or you!⁵⁵

Newspapers reported that over 8,000 members of the public had called in on the morgue in the period prior to identification on 11 January 1899, when police were informed that the body was that of Mabel Ambrose, 17 years of age, who had died in the course of an illegal abortion.⁵⁶

The Paris public may have frequented its 'Musée de la mort' to gawk at drowned bodies 'commes ailleurs on va pour voir la modes nouvelles, les orangers en fleurs, les maronniers'.⁵⁷ For a period at the end of the nineteenth century at least, its Melbourne counterpart, too, may have operated as a lurid but nonetheless acceptable venue for macabre titillation.⁵⁸ At the same time, however, despite the 'sensation-hunters' (the crowds in Melbourne, as in Paris, noted as being disproportionately working-class and female),⁵⁹ public protocols were changing. While these transformations might be more broadly concomitant with general shifts in social sensibilities and the moulding of instinctual urges that saw a withdrawing of bodily functions from the public gaze,⁶⁰ restricted access to inquests was also a particular part of a changing equilibrium between science and populism, and the inquest's re-definition as an essentially scientific event.⁶¹

Conclusion
Around a quarter of a century ago now, Phillipe Ariès opened up the question of how attitudes to death have changed historically. He also championed the argument that there was a massive 'denial' of death in the nineteenth century, the most immediate link with our own modern discomfort with death and the strategies used to hide it from view.⁶² Complaints about Ariès' use of evidence are well-rehearsed, and the theoretical underpinning of 'denial' has also been attacked.⁶³ For the reasons outlined in our introduction, we suggest that the morgue is a good test of this argument. The evidence from the attempts to find a suitable location for Melbourne's nineteenth-century morgue points to the occurrence of fundamental shifts in attitudes to death.

Nevertheless, the critics are right: 'denial' does not adequately express it. The attempt to 'hide' death in the morgue served only to draw attention to it. Instead of bodies in private houses, or even in public houses, an institution had been created where bodies could always be seen, and to which they had to be transported in the first place. As our discussion of the morgue as a place for the identification of bodies - if not for public entertainment - has shown, one of the primary functions of the morgue was to put corpses on display. This ambiguity ran right through arguments over the location of the morgue, and was perhaps partly responsible for the inability of officials to agree on any location for long. Other factors must assume an important role. Melbourne's gold-rush population boom (creating a youthful society which may have felt the revulsion of death more keenly) and hot summer climate also go some way towards explaining the early need for a morgue; after all, as the Age had noted: 'Who ever heard of a morgue in London, or any of the large towns of the United Kingdom?'⁶⁴

Concerns about health played a surprisingly insignificant role, especially in contrast to the fears of miasmas from the dead in cemeteries. Medical and bureaucratic authority over the dead was important, and the City Coroners in the period (Wilmot, Youl and Candler) were prominent medical men. A constant theme of the debate was 'decency', and the sensitivities of Melbourne's ladies, merchants and 'rich cits' were of great concern to the bureaucrats and press we have surveyed here. This was as much about appearance as about death itself; a similar heightened sensitivity is revealed, for example, in the introduction of by-laws against bodily functions such as spitting and public urination, prior to their being retrospectively supported by new epidemiological doctrines.⁶⁵

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, inquests were increasingly held at the Melbourne morgue; the morgue was a place where the inquest was transformed. The ad hoc inquest process, carried out in hotels by men who had little experience, was succeeded by a well-organised profession in a custom-built institution.⁶⁶ English forensic medicine has traditionally been seen as the black sheep of the European forensic family. Recently historians have shown that this reputation may be unjustified; that, while the English were slow to publish formal treatises on anatomy, they were practising forensic medicine all along. In the morgue we see both aspects: the practice of asking medical men to make dissections, and a theoretical interest in the new science.