Blog

I am not a person who generally feels well-informed; for a year I called our Prime Minister Julia Jillard. So I’ve been reading a series of remedial primers, the Oxford Very Short Introduction.  >

Elsewhere
Fascinating look at the true origin of the AIDS virus >

Ad

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

The Morgue

Racheal Weaver September 06

In the September issue of Meanjin, Racheal Weaver reminds us that, not so long ago, morgues were a place where the town’s citizens went to be entertained. From Paris to Melbourne, this dark tourism saw corpses and heads on display as curio for all to see. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page. Bronwyn Mehan’s post on the inclusion of a grisly photo in the print edition can also be found here.

The conditions and placement of the Melbourne morgue long remained a regular topic of public debate. Its various incarnations at the Australian Wharf, at Prince’s Bridge, at Cole’s Wharf and finally in Batman Avenue were viewed, at different times, as horrifying, unsanitary and inadequate. Reports of rats mutilating the corpses so that they had to be covered with wire mesh, of the building surrounded by a deep layer of mud in wet weather inhibiting the approach of visitors, of stifling heat in summer and miserable cold in winter, a lack of ventilation and adequate light and an unbearable stench all made the news over the years.

The Paris morgue was often invoked as a point of comparison in the cases both for and against the relocation and redevelopment of the Melbourne morgue. A letter to the Age in 1870 described the very idea of a morgue as ‘a gloomy emanation from the morbid sentimentality of the French mind’ and suggested ‘that forms the very reverse of a recommendation for its adoption among us’. Others argued that, despite its visibility and potential sensationalism, a purpose-built morgue offered a greater sense of decency in its management of the dead, as in a letter to the editor of the Argus published in May 1868: ‘You have, no doubt, seen the morgue in Paris and other continental cities. There the unhappy dead are treated with the utmost consideration, although, for the purposes of identification, they are properly exposed to public view. Here the accompaniments of their exposure are only filthy and disgusting.’ There seems to be no question here that sightseers will always be around when there is a corpse to be viewed. The concern is not to prevent people looking at dead bodies, but to control the nature of the spectacle by locating it within a clean and properly institutional setting.

A similar argument was made two years later in an Argus editorial, which moves between a knowing indulgence of the Paris morgue’s sensationalism and an argument for its importance as a social institution. The writer notes that ‘everyone has heard of the Paris Morgue … We have no doubt, indeed, that there are many worthy colonists among us who are accustomed to relate with some gusto their experiences among the crowd at the wooden window, and how shocked were their Anglo-Australian eyes at the sight of an exposed corpse.’ While the Melbourne morgue ‘equals the Paris prototype in sensationalism’, the writer continues, ‘it goes far beyond it in matters of dirt, inconvenience and ill-odour’. The scandal here, once again, is not to present a dead body as a spectacle to be viewed by the public, but to fail to provide it with an appropriately clinical context.

Furtive and recreational viewings of corpses by members of the public seem to have been commonplace in Melbourne in the second half of the nineteenth century, regardless of complaints about the uninviting exhibition spaces. One article describes the use of lime chloride on the dissecting slab when the morgue was located at the Australian Wharf, to ‘remove all unpleasant traces when the “relatives” and idlers come to view the body’. Gaps in the building walls, meanwhile, would ‘make peepholes through which the blackguards of the wharves could criticise the operating surgeon at his work, coarsely jesting with each other on the appearance of the corpse’. Another article mentions that it was a ‘common thing for the children of the neighbourhood to go and open the window when bodies are lying there, and to regard the loathsome exhibition as an amusement’. Such allusions to tourists and thrillseekers illicitly viewing dead bodies appear regularly in the press. But it was not until early 1899 during a sensation surrounding a mysterious murder that the Melbourne morgue drew crowds to rival those of its Parisian counterpart.


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.