69 Facts About Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Graham Burchett 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.

Wilfred Burchett was the first western journalist to interview Yuri Gagarin after Gagarin's historic first flight into outer space.

Wilfred Burchett played a role in prompting the first significant Western relief for Cambodia after its liberation by Vietnam in 1979.

Wilfred Burchett was a politically engaged anti-imperialist who always placed himself among the people and events about whom he was reporting.

Wilfred Burchett's reporting antagonised both the American and Australian governments and he was effectively exiled from Australia for almost 20 years before the incoming Whitlam government granted him a new passport.

Wilfred Burchett was born in Clifton Hill, Melbourne in 1911 to George Harold and Mary Jane Eveline Wilfred Burchett.

Wilfred Burchett's 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".

Wilfred Burchett spent his youth in the south Gippsland town of Poowong and then Ballarat, where Wilfred attended the Agricultural High School.

Wilfred Burchett visited Germany in 1938 before returning to Australia with his wife in 1939.

Wilfred 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.

Wilfred Burchett recounted his experiences in his book Pacific Treasure Island: New Caledonia.

Wilfred Burchett next travelled to the then Chinese capital, Chongqing, becoming a correspondent for the London Daily Express and writing for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

Wilfred Burchett was wounded while reporting on Britain's campaign in Burma.

Wilfred Burchett covered the American advance in the Pacific under General Douglas MacArthur.

Wilfred 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".

Wilfred Burchett was unarmed, and carrying rations for seven meals, a black umbrella and a Baby Hermes typewriter.

On this "scoop of the century", which had a worldwide impact, Wilfred Burchett's byline was incorrectly given as "by Peter Wilfred Burchett".

Wilfred Burchett's report was the first in the Western media to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout and was, therefore, a major embarrassment for the US military.

Wilfred Burchett lost his press accreditation and he was ordered to leave Japan, although this order was later withdrawn.

Wilfred Burchett wrote about his experiences in his book, Shadows of Hiroshima.

Wilfred Burchett covered some of the post-war political trials in Hungary, including that of Cardinal Mindszenty in 1949, and of the communist Laszlo Rajk, who was convicted and executed the same year.

Wilfred Burchett described Rajk as a "Titoist spy" and a "tool of American and British intelligence".

Wilfred Burchett praised the post-war Stalinist purges in Bulgaria: the "Bulgarian conspirators were the left arm of the Hungarian reactionary right arm".

Wilfred Burchett returned to Australia in 1950 and campaigned against Robert Menzies' bill to ban the Communist Party.

In 1951, Wilfred Burchett travelled to the People's Republic of China as a foreign correspondent for the French communist newspaper L'Humanite.

Wilfred Burchett investigated and confirmed claims by the North Korean government that the US had used Germ warfare in the Korean War.

Australian journalist Denis Warner suggested Wilfred Burchett had concocted the claim that the USA was engaging in germ warfare and pointed out the similarity of the allegations to a science fiction story by Jack London, a favourite author of Wilfred Burchett's.

Wilfred Burchett's finding was later supported by a 2010 report by al-Jazeera.

Wilfred Burchett visited several POW camps in North Korea, comparing one to a "luxury resort", a "holiday resort in Switzerland", which angered POWs who had been held under conditions that violated the Geneva Conventions.

Historian Gavan McCormack wrote that Wilfred Burchett regretted this analogy, but said that the factual basis of the description was confirmed by POW Walker Mahurin.

On 21 December 1951, Burchett achieved a major scoop by interviewing the most senior United Nations POW, US General William F Dean and organising for photographs of Dean to be taken.

Wilfred Burchett expressed thanks for Burchett's "special kindness" in improving his conditions, communicating with his family, and giving him an "accurate" briefing on the state of the war.

In 1956, Wilfred Burchett arrived in Moscow as a correspondent for the National Guardian newspaper, while writing for the Daily Express, and, from 1960, for the Financial Times.

In 1961, Wilfred Burchett was the first western journalist to interview Yuri Gagarin after his historic space flight.

In 1973, Wilfred Burchett published China: The Quality of Life, with co-author Rewi Alley.

In 1962, Wilfred Burchett began writing on the war in Vietnam, from the North Vietnamese side.

When US President Kennedy increased funding for the war in Vietnam, Wilfred Burchett wrote: "No peasants anywhere in the world had so many dollars per capita lavished on their extermination".

Wilfred Burchett described Ho Chi Minh as "the greatest man I've ever met, with all the modesty and simplicity that goes with human greatness".

Wilfred Burchett tried to help the British and US governments in obtaining the release of captured American airmen.

Wilfred Burchett played a role in trying to organise informal talks during the 1968 peace talks in Paris.

In 1975 and 1976, Wilfred Burchett sent a number of dispatches from Cambodia praising the new government of Pol Pot.

Wilfred 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 Wilfred Burchett took to London, where he read it out at an all-party meeting in the House of Commons.

Wilfred Burchett 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".

Greg Lockhart analysed Wilfred Burchett's writing in an article in The Australian newspaper.

Lockhart thought the "involved narrator" present in Wilfred Burchett's writing was similar to that of Henry Lawson.

Sinologist Michael Godley said that the camera verite method, which was in vogue in Beijing in 1951 when Wilfred Burchett was there, may have influenced his style.

Wilfred Burchett again requested an Australian passport in 1960 and 1965 but was denied both times.

For many years Wilfred 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 Wilfred Burchett said he needed an attache case to carry it.

Matters came to a head in 1969 when Wilfred Burchett was refused entry into Australia to attend his father's funeral.

Conservative Australian governments between 1949 and 1970 tried to construct a case to prosecute Wilfred Burchett but were unable to do so.

Wilfred Burchett is an expert linguist and has travelled extensively.

Wilfred Burchett first met Yuri Krotkov in Berlin after the second world war and they met again when Wilfred Burchett moved to Moscow in 1957.

Wilfred Burchett had been a low-ranking KGB agent who the British passed on to the Americans.

In November 1969, Krotkov testified before the US Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security that Wilfred Burchett had been his agent when he worked as a KGB controller.

Wilfred Burchett claimed that Burchett had proposed a "special relationship" with the Soviets at their first meeting in Berlin in 1947.

Krotkov said that Wilfred Burchett had worked as an agent for both Vietnam and China and was a secret member of the Communist Party of Australia.

In February 1973 Wilfred Burchett filed a one-million-dollar libel suit against DLP senator Jack Kane, who was Focuss publisher.

The former prisoners testified that Wilfred Burchett had used threatening and insulting language against them and in some cases had been involved in their interrogations.

North Vietnamese defectors, Bui Cong Tuong and To Ming Trung, testified at the trial, claiming that Wilfred Burchett was so highly regarded in Hanoi he was known as "Comrade Soldier", a title he shared only with Lenin and Ho Chi Minh.

The jury found Wilfred Burchett had been defamed, but considered the Focus article a fair report of the 1971 Senate speech by Gair and therefore protected by parliamentary privilege.

Tom Heenan, from the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, was not convinced by the evidence Manne quoted and wrote that, if the KGB had given money to Wilfred Burchett, it had been shortchanged, since Wilfred Burchett had moved away from Soviet Communism and towards the Chinese by the 1960s.

Wilfred Burchett moved to Bulgaria in 1982 and died of cancer in Sofia the following year, aged 72.

Nick Shimmin, co-editor of the book Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett said "When he saw injustice and hardship, he criticised those he believed responsible for it".

Wilfred Burchett met and married his first wife Erna Lewy, a German Jewish refugee, in London and they married in 1938.

Wilfred Burchett's children were denied Australian citizenship at the request of Robert Menzies in 1955.

Wilfred Burchett's son George was born in Hanoi, and grew up in Moscow and France.

Wilfred Burchett lived in Hanoi and edited some of his father's writings and produced a documentary.

Wilfred Burchett was the uncle of chef and cookbook writer Stephanie Alexander.