A writer of courage and conviction

March 22, 2006
Issue 

Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett
Edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin
University of NSW Press
785 pages, $59.95

REVIEW BY BRENDAN DOYLE

This weighty volume contains the full, unexpurgated autobiography of one of Australia's most interesting and controversial journalists and war correspondents. Wilfred Burchett (1911-1983) was an inveterate traveller who experienced first-hand and reported on some of the major political events of his century.

Burchett saw himself as a heretic, and was proud of it. He could not abide the hypocrisy of the Australian establishment, who were prepared to go to amazing lengths to punish a journalist who dared to report the truth as he saw it, especially "from the other side".

The offspring of South Gippsland pioneers, Burchett grew up in the Poowong district south-east of Melbourne. A gifted story-teller, his account of years of poverty and precarious survival on rural properties with his parents and three siblings is full of rich and rewarding detail. This early part of the book is a precious document of working-class and rural life in the early part of the century.

As a young man, he was no stranger to tragedy. His sister Amy died from cancer at 18. The medical bills ruined his father financially. Seriously in debt to a real estate agent and the banks, the family lost everything during a recession, which turned out to be the beginning of the Great Depression. But the family fought on and by back-breaking toil managed to survive and rebuild a life.

At Coffs Harbour in northern NSW, he got a job with cane-cutters, who were "my first contact with organised workers and I greatly admired their independence and above all their comradeship, their sticking together and standing up for the weak against the strong". This feeling for the underdog, rather than communist theory, was to influence Burchett's support for many revolutionary causes in the decades to follow.

In 1934 he met Egon Kisch, the journalist who had been expelled from Germany by the Nazis and was visiting Australia as a guest of the anti-war movement. Greatly impressed by Kisch's courage and gift for words, Burchett decided to also become a journalist "with the world as his beat".

He first left Australia at 25 on a voyage of discovery to Europe, but found himself stranded at Tahiti when the ship's captain refused to take the badly seasick Burchett any further. There he was initiated into the delights of the flesh by Natua, a Tahitian woman, whose "almost innocent frankness in bed made short shrift of my Methodist inhibitions", he writes. This delightfully frank account contrasts with Burchett's silence on his later affairs, reportedly numerous.

After Burma and China, where he covered the rise of Mao and the coming confrontation with Japan, Burchett went to Okinawa where, in August 1945, he heard on the radio that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. He took a risky train journey there and, sitting on a concrete block amidst the devastation, described, for London's Daily Express, the effects of what he called "the atomic plague". It still makes chilling reading.

The start of his career reporting "from the other side" began in Prague in 1946, where he met up with Egon Kisch and journalist John Fisher to cover the elections, in which the Communist Party won the biggest vote. So began an extended period behind the "Iron Curtain".

In 1949 he sat through the trials in Yugoslavia of officials convicted of plotting to overthrow Tito, who they believed was working for the CIA. The plotters were executed. Burchett admits that he felt "very hostile towards the Yugoslav regime for a few years". He felt that Tito was playing into the hands of those who were out to discredit the Soviet Union.

At the outbreak of war in Korea, Burchett went to Mao's China, which he saw as the real target of the US-led invasion of North Korea. From Pyongyang he sent reports that the US military were using bacteriological weapons.

In 1954 he met Ho Chi Minh and so began a long-lasting personal relationship. He found himself in conflict with US and Australian policy on Indochina. "And yet", he writes, "how useful I could have been to both countries had their policies been to settle conflicts rather than enlarge them".

Burchett's brief and dismissive account of the 1956 Hungarian uprising is indicative of his rather uncritical support of the Soviet bloc regimes. "A lot of heroism was uselessly expended in that uprising", he writes. The Soviet Union, he adds, "intervened in a decisive way". End of story.

By 1962 he was reporting the war in Vietnam from behind enemy lines. Convinced that the US, like the French, were doomed to fail, he also knew it would be a long and bloody conflict. "There are few enterprises as difficult and hazardous as trying to take a war away from the war-makers once they have sunk their fangs into it." Burchett found himself embedded with NLF troops, who he was astonished to learn were well equipped with captured US gear and weapons. With self-deprecating humour he relates how he had to get his huge bulk down manholes into the tunnel systems, got stuck on one occasion and had to be dug out from the other side.

He debunks the official Pentagon line that his reporting — and that of Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times — was influenced by communist propaganda, when both reported US bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam.

Burchett defended what he called "creative journalism, not just recording history in the making but helping to shape it in a positive sense". In order to achieve such outcomes and to settle conflicts, he was willing to travel anywhere and talk to anyone, often undertaking perilous journeys and leaving his children for months on end in his second wife Vessa's care. He even had breakfast in Washington with Henry Kissinger, who wanted to pump him for inside information on Hanoi's intentions.

Because of his friendships with leaders such as Chou En Lai and Ho Chi Minh, Burchett earned the ire of the anti-communist Democratic Labor Party in Australia, who accused him of being a KGB agent.

Some commentators have said that Burchett had many blind spots. His great admiration for certain leaders may have blinded him to their faults and even their crimes. His autobiography remains however, a major contribution to our understanding of the world as it was in the turbulent Twentieth Century, including Australia's blind support of US policy.

From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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