The need for a place to conduct post mortem examinations was not mentioned in any of Wilmot's proposals for a morgue, although he had suggested that an Assistant Surgeon be appointed to his staff, observing that 'Medical jurisprudence is now regarded as a distinct branch of science, and well worth the attention and fostering of enlightened legislature'.⁶⁷ Youl included the cost of 'a post mortem examination room &c' in his estimates of the cost of the morgue in 1854. From being just one of the functions of the morgue, the importance of the post mortem grew over time. In a sample of inquests we have examined from the morgue in 1859, 42% included a post mortem examination. In 1896-7 that figure had risen to 82%, and a medical examination of the body - without opening it - was held in a further 5% of cases.⁶⁸ By the time the jury was practically abolished in 1903, the importance of professional knowledge of the body had overtaken the value given to the observations of the lay jurors. By creating a regular supply of bodies, especially for practitioners like Neild and Crawford Mollison, the morgue fostered the development of forensic medicine in Victoria as much as it was the product of this developing field.

The establishment of a central, custom-built morgue in Melbourne in the mid-1850s appears to have taken place earlier than in London or New York; Melbourne was in a sense the laboratory of Empire. The needs of family, friends and state to identify the dead in an immigrant society, and the heat of the Australian summer, provided the impetus. To these endogenous colonial factors can be added a falling tolerance found throughout the West in the nineteenth century to unpleasant sights, smells, and the mere presence of the dead. Ultimately, the anxiety created by these feelings was enough to ensure that Melbourne's morgue did not stay in a prominent position for long. With occasional exceptions of public spectacle, the morgue became the institutional home of the Coroner, and a site for forensic expertise. It began to develop its own institutional culture, largely sequestered from the city around it.

Notes
1. The authors thank the following for feedback on their research: respondents to a query posted on H-URBAN; participants in the Melbourne Urban History Discussion Group; delegates at a paper delivered at the 5th International Conference on The Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, Goldsmith's College, University of London, September 2000. Thanks also to Sam Furphy, Helen Harris, Christina Twomey, Dean Wilson and Juliet Flesch for references and research assistance.
2. 'A Jury man' to Colonial Secretary, 16 February 1855, Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 1189, Unit 135, Item L55/2462.
3. Age, 16 February 1855.
4. Times, 9 January 1854; 14 January 1864; 28 April 1864; 8 July 1864; New York Times, 28 April 1864.
5. The American morgue, championed initially by the Commissioner of Charities and Corrections and constructed 'upon the plan of the famous Morgue at Paris', had by 1882 itself become a repulsive, decaying structure 'unworthy of our civilization', and was relocated a decade later. J DeLuca, 'Morgues' in KT Jackson (ed.), The Encyclopedia of New York City, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., & New York Historical Society, 1995, pp. 770-1; New York Times, 1 July 1865; 8 February 1866; 20 June 1866; 23 February 1882; 15 May 1892.
6. Pat Jalland's Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history 1840-1918, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2002, is the most comprehensive history of death and loss in Australia.
7. Allan Mitchell, 'The Paris morgue as a social institution in the nineteenth century', Francia, vol. 4, 1976, pp. 581-96; id., 'Philippe Ariès and the French way of death', French Historical Studies, vol. 10, 1978, pp. 691-4.
8. Unless otherwise indicated, this paper draws on correspondence files located in PROV: VPRS 24, Units 56, 62, 65, 69; VPRS 44, Unit 687; VPRS 69, Units 3, 14; VPRS 242, Unit 17; VPRS 266, Units 3A, 284, 413; VPRS 1189, Unit 146; VPRS 1198, Units 128, 133, 185, 191.
9. Melbourne City Council Minutes, vol. 6, pp. 1893-4 (7 June 1852) and p. 1895 (21 June 1852).
10. loc. cit.; D Dunstan, Governing the metropolis: politics, technology and social change in a Victorian city: Melbourne 1850-1891, Melbourne University Press, 1984, p. 149.
11. Coroner Wilmot to Colonial Secretary, 13 January 1853, VPRS 1198, Unit 128, Item 53/446.
12. Argus, 11 January 11 1853. Unfortunately, there is still no social history of the coroner in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there is a growing body of work on related issues: TR Forbes, 'Crowner's quest', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 68, 1978, pp. 1-52; JDJ Havard, The detection of secret homicide: a study of the medico-legal system of investigation of sudden and unexplained deaths, Macmillan, London, 1960; RF Hunnisett, 'The importance of eighteenth-century coroners' bills', in EW Ives and AH Manchester (eds), Law, Litigants and the Legal Profession: Papers presented to the Fourth British Legal History Conference at the University of Birmingham, 10-13 July 1979, Royal Historical Society, London, & Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1983, pp. 126-39; E Cawthon, 'Thomas Wakely and the medical coronership: occupational death and the judicial process', Medical History, vol. 30, 1986, pp. 191-202, and 'New life for the deodand: coroners' inquests and occupational deaths in England, 1830-46', American Journal of Legal History, vol. 33, 1989, pp. 137-47; J Sim & T Ward, 'The magistrate of the poor? Coroners and deaths in custody in nineteenth-century England', in M Clark & C Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine in History, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 245-67; O Anderson, Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, chap. 1; R Richardson, Death, dissection and the destitute, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987; M MacDonald and TR Murphy, Sleepless souls: suicide in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, chap. 4; IA Burney, 'Viewing bodies: medicine, public order, and English inquest practice', Configurations, vol. 2, no. 1, 1994, pp. 33-46; RW England, Jr, 'Investigating homicides in Northern England, 1800-1824', Criminal Justice History, vol. 6, 1985, pp. 105-23; D Zuck, 'Mr Troutbeck as the surgeon's friend: the coroner and the doctors - an Edwardian comedy', Medical History, vol. 39, 1995, pp. 259-87; GHH Glasgow, 'The election of county coroners in England and Wales circa 1800-1888', Journal of Legal History, vol. 20, no. 3, 1999, pp. 75-108; IA Burney, Bodies of evidence: medicine and the politics of the English inquest, 1830-1926, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1999; MB Emmerichs, 'Getting away with murder? Homicide and the coroners in nineteenth-century London', Social Science History, vol. 25, no. 1, 2001, pp. 93-100.
13. An Act to consolidate and amend the Laws relating to the licensing of Public Houses and the Sale of Fermented and Spiritous Liquors, 27 Vic. No. 227 (1864) s. 55.
14. CH Mollison commenting on GA Paton, 'The development of forensic medicine', Proceedings of the Medico-Legal Society of Victoria, vol. 4, 1939-41, p. 261. Mollison's textbook draws on his experience in Melbourne's morgue: Lectures on forensic medicine (1921). See also 'Some medico-legal reminiscences', Proceedings of the Medico-Legal Society of Victoria, vol. 2, 1933-6, pp. 63-83.
15. From sampling of VPRS 24, Coroners' Inquest Papers.
16. A Higonnet, M Higonnet & P Higonnet, 'Façades: Walter Benjamin's Paris', Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, 1984, pp. 391-419; VR Schwartz, 'The morgue and the Musée Grévin: understanding the public taste for reality in fin-de-siècle Paris', The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 7, 1994, pp. 151-73; Mitchell, 'The Paris morgue'; B Bertherat, 'Les visiteurs de la morgue', L'Histoire, vol. 180, 1994, pp. 16-21.
17. F Maillard, Recherches historiques et critique sur la morgue, Paris, 1860, pp. 92-3.
18. Quoted in Maillard, p. 94.
19. Mitchell, 'The Paris morgue', pp. 581-2; Bertherat, pp. 16-21.
20. VPRS 266, Crown Law Office Inwards Correspondence, Unit 284, Item 75/4301.
21. Age, 13 January 1871.
22. In 1869 the Board of Health included identification as a function of the morgue. The Argus agreed with Youl and the Mayor: Argus, 30 December 1854.
23. Melbourne's average maximum temperatures in the summer months are approximately 4oC higher than those of London or Paris. While New York City experiences higher average summer maximums, Melbourne's overall average yearly temperature and highest maximum temperatures exceed those of the other three cities.
24. M Perrot (ed.), A history of private life, vol. IV: From the fires of revolution to the Great War, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 468-75; L Prior's 'Policing the dead: a sociology of the mortuary', Sociology, vol. 21, 1987, pp. 355-76 develops this theme, but not in an historical framework; IA Burney's 'Viewing bodies' discusses the limits of the medical gaze, which was enforced by the popularity of the coroners' jury. It is interesting to note that the Victorian coroners' jury was, for all practical purposes, abolished in 1903 (Coroners Act 1903, 3 Edw. VII, No. 1828).
25. Wilmot to Colonial Secretary, 1 March 1853, VPRS 1198, Unit 128, stack marked 'Coroner', Item A53/2204.
26. loc. cit.
27. The regulation of nineteenth-century public space generally, and women's value as the focus of male competitive exchange that involved the stereotype of female 'delicacy' being invoked in the mitigation of a variety of perceived urban nuisances in particular, have been explored in relation to nineteenth-century Melbourne in A Brown-May, Melbourne street life, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1998.
28. MCC Minutes, 9 August 1853.
29. Argus, 22 April 1854; 15 May 1854.
30. Colonial Engineer to Colonial Secretary, 26 May 1854, VPRS 1198, Unit 128, stack marked 'Coroner', Item E54/5695.
31. Argus, 10 June 1854.
32. Argus, 1 December 1854; see also Argus, 30 December 1854.
33. Argus, 3 January 1855.
34. Argus, 27 January 1855.
35. VPRS 937, Unit 284.
36. Inspector General of Public Works to Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands, 13 September 1864, VPRS 44, Unit 687, J64/8348.
37. Minute for the Chief Commissioner of Police by the Inspector General of Public Works, 8 May 1867, VPRS 266, Unit 284, Item 75/4301.
38. Anderson, chap. 1; Havard, chap. 4.
39. M Finnane, Police and government: histories of policing in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, chap. 1; R Haldane, The people's force: a history of the Victoria Police, Melbourne University Press, 1986.
40. Argus, 13 February 1871.
41. Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), vol. 25, 13 December 1876, p. 1734.
42. Candler to the Minister of Justice, 17 August 1878, VPRS 266, Unit 317.
43. Argus, 17 January 1900.
44. Age, 20 April 1908.
45. VPD, vol. 45, 9 July 1884, p. 494.
46. Youl, 9 July 1884, VPRS 266, Unit 413, Item 87/3721.
47. Secretary Harriman, Crown Law Office, Memo, 8 July 1887, VPRS 266, Unit 413, Item 87/3721.
48. VPD, vol. 48, 28 July 1885, p. 460.
49. VPD, vol. 52, 24 August 1886, p. 1178.
50. loc. cit.
51. VPRS 266, Unit 284, Item 75/4301.
52. loc. cit.
53. VPD, Session 1886, vol. 53, 8 December 1886, p. 2699.
54. Bulletin, 9 July 1892, p. 21.
55. Bulletin, 21 January 1898.
56. loc. cit.
57. Gozlan quoted in Maillard, p. 93. See also K Baedeker's Paris and its environs, Leipsic, 1900, p. 227.
58. On the Paris morgue as spectacle see V Schwartz, Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, pp. 45-88.
59. Argus, 20 December 1898; Maillard, p. 87.
60. See for example N Elias, The civilising process, trans. E Jephcott, Urizen Books, New York, 1978; A Corbin, The foul and the fragrant: odor and the French social imagination, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986.
61. Burney, 'Viewing bodies', p. 33.
62. P Ariès, Western attitudes toward death: from the Middle Ages to the present, trans. PM Ranum, Marion Boyars, London, 1976; and The hour of our death, trans. H Weaver, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983 (1977). See also G Gorer, 'The pornography of death', Encounter, vol. 5, 1955, pp. 49-52; and Death, grief, and mourning in contemporary Britain, Cresset Press, London, 1965.
63. A Kellehear, 'Are we a "death-denying" society? A sociological review', Social Science and Medicine, vol. 18, 1984, pp. 713-23; T Walter, 'Modern death: taboo or not taboo?', Sociology, vol. 25, 1991, pp. 293-310. Historians have also criticised this aspect of Ariès's achievement: R Houlbrooke, 'Introduction' to his (ed.), Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, Routledge, London, 1989, p. 4; D Cannadine, 'War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain', in J Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, Europa, London, 1981, pp. 187-242; PC Jupp & C Gittings (eds), Death in England: an illustrated history, Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 2.
64. Age, 13 January 1870.
65. On changing attitudes to public urination and expectoration in the nineteenth-century city, see Brown-May, pp. 64-88.
66. S Cooke, 'A "dirty little secret"? The State, the press, and popular knowledge of suicide in Victoria, 1840s-1920s', Australian Historical Studies, vol. 115, 2000, pp. 304-24.
67. WB Wilmot, 9 July 1853, VPRS 1189, Unit 146, Item C53/6852.
68. From a sample of 100 consecutive inquests held in Melbourne (57 of which were at the morgue) between 2 September 1896 and 18 January 1897 (VPRS 1205/P1).

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