Macabre tourism: from Hiroshima to nuclear testing in Australia

On August 10, 1945, geologist Shogo Nagaoka (1901-1973), a resident of Otake, Hiroshima Prefecture, returned once again to the site of the bomb impact, which he had visited the day after the catastrophe. His intention: to collect samples of what was left. In fact, little to nothing: the heat of the explosion had swept away almost everything. What survived were tiles, rubble, bottles, discolored and charred pebbles, objects that, from then on, he accumulated in his house to study the effects of the destruction. A member of the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at the local university, he was summoned to form a team in charge of the petrographic analysis of a city reduced to rubble. With his collection, carried out with precision, recording the orientation of objects and measuring the direction and angle of the shadows left by the thermal rays, Nagaoka was able to calculate the hypocenter of the explosion.

In 1949, the Chuo Community Center opened next to the city's Chamber of Commerce. It included a reference room displaying artifacts created by the atomic bomb and collected by Nagaoka. Years later, these artifacts were incorporated into the Peace Museum , established in 1955 under his direction and which today attracts more than 100 million visitors annually, also exhibiting documents and personal belongings. "The traces of evil," as Nagaoka called them, were collected through the collaboration of others who donated them to an institution that, for a long time, operated with the geologist as its sole employee.

Nagaoka, who had studied in Manchuria , was not content with simply collecting objects and creating a collection for his city: several of these fragments were distributed to various museums around the world. Among others, the Powerhouse Museum Consortium in New South Wales possesses some fragments of stones and tiles traditionally made but burned by the bomb. The catalogue describes them as building materials collected by Nagaoka that fateful August 1945 and which, it seems, he gave to the Australian Corporal Fredrick Harold Spring , who arrived in Japan as part of the 77 Squadron in December 1947.

Two years later, in 1949, Spring donated them in a box to the Australian Museum in Sydney , which, in 1950, transferred them to the Museum of Technology and Applied Sciences in that city. Today, they are part of the collections of Powerhouse, a museum association established as a dialogue between science and applied arts, design, innovation, and technology, and which contains more than 500,000 objects in its inventory. Among them are those Nagaoka pieces but also the bottles of U-LA, a radioactive mineral water "made in Australia" and marketed by Geo Hall & Sons in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, these collections are studied by archaeologists around the world who are dedicated to nuclear waste, an interest almost intrinsic to this discipline whose core, let us not forget, is human waste of all kinds.

Thus, the most recent World Archaeology Congress, held in the last week of June this year in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia , featured a session organized by Tracy Ireland and Steve Brown, professors at the University of Canberra , and John Schofield of the University of York in the United Kingdom . The session was called "Nuclear Heritage and Contemporary Archaeology," dedicated to nuclear material culture and industrial, military, and scientific narratives . Their proposal was that the study of this toxic waste and its consequences—which includes tourism—could contribute to the discussion of public policies on nuclear energy. In a country like Australia, rich in uranium mines, with a not inconsiderable history of experimental atomic explosions and their victims—these issues are the order of the day.

Without having to leave this gigantic island, a few thousand kilometers away in South Australia, between 1956 and 1957, during the Cold War , the British army detonated seven nuclear tests at Maralinga and two at Emu Fields, accompanied by a series of smaller tests. It's not for nothing that some people say that the Mad Max saga is a metaphor or a documentary about life in Australia . The truth is that these explosions would have contaminated a fairly large area, from which the Aboriginal population had previously been displaced, but who, however, continued to live in the "forbidden zone" for more than five years.

In 1995, the British government was required to compensate the victims with approximately $14 million. During that same decade, Maralinga was "cleaned up," meaning countless kilograms of plutonium were buried in shallow, unlined pits in geology unsuitable for their containment. This intervention simultaneously created a repository, a layer of 20th-century technological and political history. No archaeologist or paleontologist will go to excavate them: the nuclear map of Australia and many signs warn of their whereabouts, and no one, today, would go, as they did in 1945, to pick up those stones with their hands. That doesn't prevent this "Zone" from becoming a tourist attraction, promising a tour of one of the most sinister sides of local history and, in 2019, winning the South Australian Tourism Award.

Philip Stone of the University of Lancashire would surely classify this itinerary within his spectrum of macabre tourism, which, according to him, has been proliferating and generating profits throughout the universe for decades. For Stone, disasters and atrocities are becoming an increasingly omnipresent feature of tourism offerings that include spiritual journeys where the traveler supposedly confronts the experience of death and grief.

Nagaoka never lived to see his museum transformed into a hub for mass tourism, so he was unable to reflect on the absurd fate of works and things, like those a geologist collected among the ruins of the disaster: a piece of tile, a pebble, a piece of scorched earth.