Rebecca Starford,Assistant Editor of ABR
I tell you, we just don’t react to a murder like we used to.
Who likes reading about grisly murders in the newspaper? Does the report of a double homicide titillate you? Does your pulse quicken when ‘Killing Spree’ is screamed across your computer screen? Come on, be honest – you’re among friends here. (Not that I am trying to gauge the psychotic urges of the ABR readers – full of untapped bloodlust, I’m sure.) In a time when experts report our alarming anaesthetisation to violence, both virtual and ‘real’, I simply would like to ask you, reader: would you go to a mortuary to look at a severed head in a jar?
Before you close this blog window, tut-tut, and cancel your subscription to ABR, I want to assure you there is lucid method behind my question. I began framing it last month after reading about the discovery of a woman’s body in the Yarra River, headlined in the on-line Age as ‘Bizarre Yarra body find’. The brief article went on to explain:
A walker has found a body in a bag on top of Dight Falls in the Yarra River at Abbotsford. Police confirmed a body had been found in a blue bag on the top of the weir … More details as they emerge.
The following day, a small article in the ‘In Brief’ section of the same newspaper elaborated, minimally, on the initial find:
A passerby saw a leg protruding from the bag … A backpack with weights had been strapped to the cloth bag. ‘Reggie’ was tattooed on the inside of her left wrist and ‘Elsie’ on her right. A cross was tattooed under both names.
Dribbles of information surrounding the investigation were later revealed: the young woman, who had grown up in the outer western suburbs, had been a small-time drug dealer and prostitute. A ghastly end to a shocking tale, though quickly forgotten in the ephemeral world of the press.
Yet this does not explain the question of the head in the jar. Here I shall oblige. Were I not an incorrigible habitué, the recent ‘Body in the Yarra’ story might registered for a day or so and then slipped entirely from my consciousness, like that of the footy player and his drug habit, or the pop singer who flipped and shaved her head. However, being of the studious (some might say nerdish) bent, I was able to recall, with unsettling clarity, several microfiche articles I had perused during a stint at State Library Victoria. Was history repeating itself, I wondered.
Such an alarmingly metaphysical question relates specifically to an article I read in the Argus, of 15 December 1899. Headlining page 7 was ‘A Terrible Crime, Gruesome Discovery – Dead Woman in a Box Found in the Yarra’ and the amusingly obvious subheading, ‘Supposed Malpractice’.
In the following days, the page-stopping murder kept Melbournians enthralled. The Argus reported:
…the nude body of an unknown young woman was found floating in a box near the Chapel street bridge on Saturday afternoon. The body, which is that of a well-formed, healthy woman, had been in the water about a week, and, though deliberate murder was at first suspected, the post-mortem examination ... indicates that death resulted from the use of chloroform, administered, it is supposed, for the purpose of an illegal operation.
I should say so! What the deuce else would it have been used for? With her identity remaining unknown, police exhibited her severed, putrefied head at the Yarra Bank morgue on Batman Avenue. They hoped that members of the public would visit the morgue to view the head thus making an identification. In addition, a large sum of money was offered.
Personally, I can think of better ways of spending my weekend. The theatre, perhaps? Deportment classes? Even a visit to the ‘Dead Meat Market’ in North Melbourne? You can imagine it, can’t you: after doing the Block, taking a leisurely stroll along the Promenade to the Morgue to view that jolly looking head in the jar. Rum sort of afternoon that would have been.
But putrified heads were all the rage, apparently, in Melbourne 1899. For days, a steady stream of people – 2000 in all – visited the morgue. The Argus noted:
So many family parties dotted the Yarra Bank road, including children, to view the head in the preserving jar … one 100 of which were police … the vast majority seemed to be actuated by no other desire than to see the horrible object that had caused so much talk and discussion.
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a wholesome family activity. Hadn’t these people heard of the park? A picnic? Group embroidery, even?
Though I wonder at the general attitude of the public towards crime, and murder, we must put these events, and subsequent reactions, in some context. The particular case of the woman in the box came hard on the heels of the discovery of a severed arm and leg found in the river, just days earlier. (With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better to stay away from the River Yarra that year.) The fever from the Whitechapel murders across the Atlantic a decade earlier still lingered, like the updraft from Melbourne’s recently covered sewage drains. Crime enjoyed access to a multitude of discourses: if people weren’t reading about it in the dailies, they were discussing it at salons and tea parties, viewing it at the theatre, reading about it in sensational novels, such as Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886) and Francis Adams’s The Murder of Madeline Brown (1887).
In 1892 another crime gripped the city, generating unprecedented attention among the general public and in the press. Every newspaper in Melbourne was filled with reports of the discovery of a woman’s naked, decomposing body behind the hearthstone of a typical suburban villa. It was finally revealed that Frederick Bailey Deeming, a jewel thief, swindler, bigamist and conman, was responsible for this crime, along with many others. Rachael Weaver’s The Criminal of the Century (2006) is a fascinating study of Deemings, the public reaction to his crimes, and a more detailed analysis of criminality in the antipodes at the turn of the century. In 1899, of course, came our lady friend in the box. And the rest, as they say, is history.
As you can see, we just don’t react to crime in the old way. So when your requisite dinner-party conversation begins with the rant about ‘the depravity, oh, of modern society’, where ‘sex, drugs and murder etc’ that confronts in newspapers, television programmes and on-line news outlet, just savour your foie gras, sip on your sauvignon blanc, and ask, with feigned airiness, the essential question of the debate: Would you go to a mortuary to look at a severed head in a jar? You run the risk of not being invited to dinner again. Then again, you might not want to be.
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