Wilfred Burchett

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R.I.P
Wilfred

Wilfred Graham Burchett (16 September 1911 – 27 September 1983) was an Australian journalist known for being the first western journalist to report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, and for his reporting from "the other side" during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Burchett began his journalism at the start of World War II, during which he reported from China, Burma and Japan and covered the war in the Pacific. After the war he reported on the trials in Hungary, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Portugal during the Carnation Revolution, and on Cambodia under Pol Pot. During the Korean war he investigated and supported claims by the North Korean government that the US had used germ warfare. He was the first western journalist to interview Yuri Gagarin after Gagarin's historic first flight into outer space. He played a role in prompting the first significant Western relief for Cambodia after its liberation by Vietnam in 1979. He was interviewed in 1970 about his career as a journalist, which can be accessed at the National Library of Australia. He was a politically engaged anti-imperialist who always placed himself among the people and events about whom he was reporting.…Citește mai mult

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Early life Burchett was born in Clifton Hill, Melbourne in 1911 to George Harold and Mary Jane Eveline Burchett (née Davey). His father was a builder, a farmer, and a Methodist lay preacher with radical convictions who "imbued [Burchett] with a progressive approach to British India, the Soviet Union and republican China". He spent his youth in the south Gippsland town of Poowong and then Ballarat, where Wilfred attended the Agricultural High School. Poverty forced him to drop out of school at fifteen and work at various odd jobs, including as a vacuum cleaner salesman and an agricultural labourer. In his free time he studied foreign languages, mainly French and Russian. In 1937 Burchett left Australia for London by ship. There he found work in a Jewish travel agency Palestine & Orient Lloyd Ltd which resettled Jews from Nazi Germany in British Palestine and the United States. It was in this job that he met Erna Lewy, née Hammer, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and they married in 1938 in Hampstead. He visited Germany in 1938 before returning to Australia with his wife in 1939. After his return to Australia he wrote letters to newspapers warning against the danger of…Citește mai mult

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Second World War Burchett began his career in journalism in 1940 when he obtained accreditation with the Australian Associated Press to report on the revolt against the Vichy French in the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia. He recounted his experiences in his book Pacific Treasure Island: New Caledonia. Historian Beverly Smith said that Pacific Treasure Island describes Burchett's view of "the way in which Australian culture and mores, as they emerged from the pioneers' experience, could develop in harmony with those of the liberated peoples in neighbouring Asia". Burchett next travelled to the then Chinese capital, Chongqing, becoming a correspondent for the London Daily Express and also writing for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. He was wounded while reporting on Britain's campaign in Burma. He also covered the American advance in the Pacific under General Douglas MacArthur.

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Hiroshima Burchett was in Okinawa when he heard on the radio that "the world’s first A-bomb had been dropped on a place called Hiroshima". He was the first Western journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped, arriving alone by train from Tokyo on 2 September, the day of the formal surrender of Japan, after a thirty-hour train trip in breach of MacArthur's orders. He was unarmed, and carrying rations for seven meals, a black umbrella and a Hermes Baby typewriter. During his reporting, he ran into a press junket organised by Tex McCrary for promoting the United States Army Air Force and later referred to the group as "housetrained reporters" participating in a "cover-up". His Morse code dispatch was printed on the front page of the Daily Express newspaper in London on 5 September 1945. Entitled "The Atomic Plague", and with the subtitle "I Write This as a Warning to the World", it began: In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured by the cataclysm – from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic…Citește mai mult

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Eastern Europe After three years in Greece and Berlin working for the Daily Express, Burchett began reporting on Eastern Europe for The Times. He covered some of the post-war political trials in Hungary, including that of Cardinal Mindszenty in 1949, and of the communist László Rajk, who was convicted and executed the same year. Burchett described Rajk as a "Titoist spy" and a "tool of American and British intelligence". Burchett praised the post-war Stalinist purges in Bulgaria: the "Bulgarian conspirators were the left arm of the Hungarian reactionary right arm". In his autobiography, Burchett later admitted that he began to have doubts about the trials when one of the Bulgarians repudiated his signed confession. Hungarian Tibor Méray accused Burchett of dishonesty regarding the trials and the subsequent Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which he opposed.

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Korean War, 1950–1953 Burchett returned to Australia in 1950 and campaigned against Robert Menzies’ bill to ban the Communist Party. In 1951, Burchett travelled to the People's Republic of China as a foreign correspondent for the French communist newspaper L'Humanité. After six months in China he wrote China's Feet Unbound, which supported the new Chinese government of Mao Zedong. In July 1951, he and British journalist Alan Winnington made their way to North Korea to cover the Panmunjom Peace Talks. While in Korea he reported from the Northern side for the French communist newspaper Ce soir and the American radical publication National Guardian. Burchett investigated and confirmed claims by the North Korean government that the US had used Germ warfare in the Korean War. During his investigation, he observed "clusters of flies and fleas on the snow-covered hillsides", which the North Korean military said were infected with bubonic plague. In his 1953 book about the Korean war, This Monstrous War, he wrote: My main interest in the camps was to interview American airmen. The testimony of those who admitted to taking part in germ warfare has already been published. I talked to all of these airmen at length and on…Citește mai mult

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Moscow In 1956, Burchett arrived in Moscow as a correspondent for the National Guardian newspaper, while also writing for the Daily Express, and, from 1960, for the Financial Times. According to Robert Manne, Burchett received a monthly allowance from the Soviet authorities. For the next six years he reported on Soviet advances in science and the rebuilding of the post-war Soviet economy. In one dispatch Burchett wrote: "A new humanism is at work in the Soviet Union which makes that peddled in the West look shoddy, for it starts right down in the grass roots of Soviet society; its all-embracing sweep leaves behind no underprivileged". In 1961, Burchett was the first western journalist to interview Yuri Gagarin after his historic space flight. Describing Gagarin, Burchett wrote that "the first impression was of his good-natured personality; big smile -- a grin, really -- light step and an air of sunny friendliness ... His hands are incredibly hard; his eyes an almost luminous blue".

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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China In his 1946 book, Democracy with a Tommy Gun, Burchett wrote about his view of the coming crisis in Western imperialism in Asia. In particular he said that "the British Raj in India and the Kuomintang dictatorship (in China) represent decaying systems of government" and "immediately the war ended, subject people in the East began to rise" to take their "freedom and independence". Burchett eventually sided with China in the Sino-Soviet split. In 1963, he wrote to his father George that the Chinese were "one hundred per cent right", but asked George to keep his views confidential. In 1973, Burchett published China: The Quality of Life, with co-author Rewi Alley. In Robert Manne's view this was "a book of unconditional praise for Maoist China following the Great Leap Forward and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution". In a 1983 interview, Burchett said he grew disillusioned with China over its position in Angola in which it was supporting the "same side as the CIA".

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Vietnam In 1962, Burchett began writing on the war in Vietnam, from the North Vietnamese side. Beginning in November 1963, Burchett spent six months in southern Vietnam with Viet Cong guerrillas, staying in their fortified hamlets and travelling underground in their network of narrow tunnels. When US President Kennedy increased funding for the war in Vietnam, Burchett wrote: "No peasants anywhere in the world had so many dollars per capita lavished on their extermination". He described Ho Chi Minh as "the greatest man I’ve ever met, with all the modesty and simplicity that goes with human greatness". He once described Saigon as "a seething cauldron in which hissed and bubbled a witches' brew of rival French and American imperialisms spiced with feudal warlordism and fascist despotism" and decried the government of South Vietnam under Ngô Đình Diệm as "an Asian neo-fascism no less dangerous for world peace than...European fascism" was during the 1930s. During his time in Vietnam he had access to the North Vietnamese leadership and the South's Viet Cong. He tried to help the British and US governments in obtaining the release of captured American airmen. In 1967, he had a significant interview with the North Vietnamese foreign…Citește mai mult

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Portugal After hearing of the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, Burchett took the first aeroplane from Paris to Lisbon and spent months interviewing members of the military, fishermen, farmers and people in charge of cooperatives, which served as a source for the book "The Captains’ Coup". Said book would remain unpublished in English until 2025, its manuscript being considered lost for years then found at the National Library of Australia by Daniela Melo and Timothy Dale Walker, but was published in Portuguese in 1975 under the title "Portugal depois da revolução dos capitães" ("Portugal after the Captains' Revolution").

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Cambodia In 1975 and 1976, Burchett sent a number of dispatches from Cambodia praising the new government of Pol Pot. In a 14 October 1976 article for The Guardian (UK), he wrote that "Cambodia has become a worker-peasant-soldier state", and, because its new constitution "guarantees that everyone has the right to work and a fair standard of living", it was, Burchett believed, "one of the most democratic and revolutionary constitutions in existence anywhere". At the time, he believed his friend, former prince Norodom Sihanouk, was part of the leadership group. As relations between Cambodia and Vietnam deteriorated, and after Burchett visited refugee camps in 1978, he condemned the Khmer Rouge and they subsequently placed him on a death list. Burchett visited Phnom Penh in May 1979 and wrote in The Guardian about the desperate situation there. The Phnom Penh government drew up a list of required emergency relief which Burchett took to London, where he read it out at an all-party meeting in the House of Commons. He said that the governments in both Vietnam and Cambodia had assured him that relief would be welcome and that "a great many human beings are starving and need your help". The UK…Citește mai mult

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Writing style Greg Lockhart analysed Burchett's writing in an article in The Australian newspaper. Lockhart thought the "involved narrator" present in Burchett's writing was similar to that of Henry Lawson. He said Burchett's style fitted with the "politically engaged, social realist reportage -- the I narratives -- that swept progressive journalism in Europe and Asia in the '20s and '30s: George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), for instance". Lockhart said that Burchett's method of writing quickly and outside the structures of Western journalism was both a strength and a weakness of his work. Sinologist Michael Godley said that the camera verite method, which was in vogue in Beijing in 1951 when Burchett was there, may have influenced his style.

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Exile from Australia 1955–1972 In 1955, Burchett's British passport went missing, believed stolen, and the Australian Government refused to issue a replacement and asked the British to do the same. He again requested an Australian passport in 1960 and 1965 but was denied both times. A further request in July 1968 was rejected by prime minister John Gorton. For many years Burchett held a Vietnamese laissez-passer which grew so large due to the additional pages that needed to be added each time he travelled, that Burchett said he needed an attache case to carry it. While Burchett was attending a conference in Cuba, Fidel Castro learned about his passport problem, and issued him with a Cuban passport. Matters came to a head in 1969 when Burchett was refused entry into Australia to attend his father's funeral. The following year his brother Clive died, and Burchett flew to Brisbane in a privately chartered light plane as the Gorton government had threatened commercial airlines with steep penalties for flying Burchett into the country. He was allowed entry, triggering a media sensation. In 1972, an Australian passport was finally issued to Burchett by the incoming Whitlam government which said there was no evidence…Citește mai mult

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Government attempts to prosecute Burchett Conservative Australian governments between 1949 and 1970 tried to construct a case to prosecute Burchett but were unable to do so. After Burchett reported from North Korea about the use of germ warfare by the Americans, the Australian government looked at charging him with treason. It sent ASIO agents to Japan and Korea to collect evidence but in early 1954, conceded it could not prosecute him. The last attempt was in 1970, when attorney-general Tom Hughes admitted to prime minister John Gorton, that the government had no evidence against him. Hughes said that a prosecution for treason under the Crimes Act "cannot be mounted unless the war is a proclaimed war and there is a proclaimed enemy", and the Australian government had not declared war in Korea and Vietnam.

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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Australian Broadcasting Corporation Around 1967, ABC journalist Tony Ferguson filmed an interview with Burchett in Phnom Penh. According to filmmaker David Bradbury, Ferguson said that the general manager of the ABC, Talbot Duckmanton, ordered its destruction. Bradbury's own 1981 documentary film on Burchett, Public Enemy Number One was never shown in full on Australian television because the ABC refused to buy it.

Wilfred Burchett a lăsat un gând

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ASIO The Australian national security department, which became ASIO in 1949, opened a file on the whole Burchett family in the 1940s. Australian security was concerned by Burchett's father's interest in helping Jewish refugees in Melbourne, and his views on the Soviet Union and republican China. A document on Burchett's own file dated February 1944 noted: "This man is a native of Poowong and his past life has been such that his activities are worth watching closely. He is an expert linguist and has travelled extensively. A comparatively young man who married a German Jewess with a grown family, he seldom misses an opportunity to speak and act against the interests of Britain and Australia". Other documents on Burchett's file show ASIO was concerned by his scathing criticism of American imperialism.