We were in South Australia for a few days and found ourselves in Goolwa, which is nowadays a pleasant seaside town full of beach side cafes and old stone buildings, but historically was a working port at the mouth of the Murray and was where the Lady Augusta set off from to reach Swan Hill in the early 1850s.

Today, there is not much left of the industrial port, there’s a heritage railway, a tourist paddle steamer and bits of crane in the wharf area, but I did remember that Goolwa still had an old morgue dating from the 1880s, that had been built to deal with the increasing number of dead bodies fished out of the Murray, whether sailors or drunken tourists during the summer season.

I knew that the council had been looking for someone to turn it into something, Dracula’s Cocktail Bar perhaps, but I went looking for it to photograph it before it was too late.

I found it in scrub at the edge of the historic precinct looking distinctly neglected and forgotten. While the door was heavily bolted and there were two layers of steel mesh over the windows, but the shutters, as you can see from the photograph above were broken.

I stuck my camera lens through the mesh and was rewarded with a picture of the old slate topped autopsy table

There doesn’t appear to be much else left inside the building.

It seems kind of sad that a bit of history is abandoned and neglected like this, but I must admit I struggle to find a sympathetic use for a one room morgue and nineteenth century dissection table …