Wilfred burchett autobiography vs biography vs memoir
A writer of courage and conviction
Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett
Edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin
University of NSW Press
pages, $
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 () 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.
Famous autobiographies: Wilfred Graham Burchett (16 September – 27 September ) 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.
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.
Wilfred burchett autobiography vs biography definition Wilfred Graham Burchett 16 September — 27 September 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. 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 He was a politically engaged anti-imperialist who always placed himself amongst the people and events about whom he was reporting.His sister Amy died from cancer at 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 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 , he heard on the radio that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.
Wilfred burchett autobiography vs biography Jump to navigation. This weighty volume contains the full, unexpurgated autobiography of one of Australia's most interesting and controversial journalists and war correspondents. Wilfred Burchett 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".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 , 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 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 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 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.
Wilfred burchett autobiography vs biography meaning
Account Options Connexion. Version papier du livre. Nicholas L. Wilfred Burchett was one of Australia's most important - and controversial - journalists and war correspondents. This, the unexpurgated version of his remarkable autobiography, leads the reader into key moments of twentieth-century history, guided by an eyewitness who is a writer of passion and insight.The Soviet Union, he adds, "intervened in a decisive way". End of story.
By 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.
Autobiography vs memoir For most of his working life, controversial Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett chose to report from the 'other side'. His unorthodox views and activities caused him to be labeled a traitor by many. Criticized ferociously by anti-communist groups and intelligence organizations in Australia and the US, the Australian Government denied him a passport for 17 years, forcing him to live in exile. Burchett was generous to such a degree that he was even admired by detractors such as Australian journalist Denis Warner, who in a report quoted by ASIO described him as courageous, careless of his own safety, gifted in languages and with women. The magnitude of Burchett's gifts were not appreciated in Australia during his lifetime, but this epic, global eyewitness account of wars and the struggle for peace in the decades after Hitler should enable us to revisit Burchett more compassionately.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,
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