In hindsight, Michael Parkinson's TV talk show hardly seems the likeliest forum for sober reflection on nuclear annihilation.
But in 1971, the celebrity interviewer welcomed onto his celebrated stage journalist James Cameron, a man who had, 18 years earlier, witnessed the first atomic blast at Emu Field in outback South Australia.
Nuclear weapons, he told Parkinson, were "the ultimate punctuation mark" in humanity's "progress towards perdition".
The words echoed his front-page report for The Age on October 16, 1953 — the day after the test:
"The familiar mushroom column climbed unsteadily for 15,000 feet, leaned and dropped, and the world stumbled one more step towards the twilight."
Codenamed Totem, the two Emu Field bomb tests have, in the view of James Cook University author Elizabeth Tynan, been regarded for too long as mere precursors to the more notorious detonations at Maralinga.
Her new book seeks to correct this by establishing Operation Totem as a portentous episode in its own right.
"The tests there pre-dated Maralinga by three years and they caused enormous difficulty and disruption and tragedy to the Aboriginal people of the Western Desert," Dr Tynan said.
The Secret of Emu Field is the product of extensive archival excavation, including in the United Kingdom.
Amid Cold War hardships and anxieties, British officials were desperate to develop an affordable nuclear arsenal for their new fleet of jet bombers.
"They were looking to create a workable weapon; I call it the austerity bomb," Dr Tynan said.
"They wanted to do it quickly because they had the V bombers coming, they had a number of political pressures and geopolitical pressures as well."
Among several remarkable occurrences at Emu Field was the flight of a Royal Air Force Canberra bomber through the Totem 1 mushroom cloud barely six minutes after detonation.
"In colour it was a dark red-brown," Wing Commander Geoffrey Dhenin, who enthusiastically piloted the plane, later wrote.
"Until just before we emerged, the forces on the elevators increased to such an extent that I thought I might lose control."
One of the aims of that mission was to determine the threat from fallout in atmospheric testing to commercial airline traffic.
In an unforeseen irony, the atomic cloud from Totem 1 — which kept its mushroom shape "for 24 hours because of wind conditions" — was spotted by airline passengers passing over Oodnadatta.
The black mist
Today, it isn't a cloud but a mist that remains one of the few aspects of the Totem tests to endure in the collective consciousness.
The so-called "black mist" was reported by nearby Aboriginal communities, but it wasn't until a 1980 report by The Advertiser that it came to public attention.
The 1985 royal commission into British nuclear tests was equivocal on the health effects, but concluded that "Aboriginal people experienced radioactive fallout from Totem 1 in the form of a black mist or cloud at and near Wallatinna".
Bruce Lennon was a young boy at the time and likened the impact to "having a really bad flu".
"We were close to Emu Field; dad was a contractor, we did a lot of moving around," he said.
Also in the area, at Mabel Creek station, was the family of Sister Kenise Neill.
"My father at the time of the Emu Field [tests] would have been 22. There's a story that my grandmother used to tell about him," she recalled.
"He was out fencing with Aboriginal people around the station and came home covered in a black, slimy, greasy stuff."
Murray Neill was 24 when he died in 1956.
His daughter said it was now almost impossible to know whether the story told by her grandmother was an account of fallout.
"I didn't really know about Emu Fields … and because our family had left before the [later] Maralinga testing, it didn't make sense," Sister Neill said.
"I presumed the black fallout with my dad wasn't nuclear.
"It's really only through reading Elizabeth Tynan's book that I thought that my dad could have actually died from radiation."
The persistence of secrets
The black mist may have dissipated, but other mists still cloud the Totem tests.
Dr Tynan said British files she inspected during her research had since been "withdrawn from public view", and that there were unanswered questions about the second test and the plutonium fuel.
"The Operation Totem tests at Emu Field were intended as a comparative trial to test two different kinds of nuclear fuel," Dr Tynan said.
"I can't say that I ever got to the bottom of what was happening with Totem 2. From the documents I've seen, [it] was a very, very secret weapon."
By the time of the second test on October 27, James Cameron and the rest of the press pack had long since departed.
But the bomb had left its mark on Cameron's mind.
In a piece published the day after he died, in the same year as the royal commission into British tests, Cameron reflected on the nuclear age with typical grace and resignation:
"I personally witnessed the explosion of atom bombs, and did nothing about it, and could do nothing except protest, tiresomely and uselessly."
This article is the second in a two-part series, the first of which focused on the tests at Maralinga.
