Weekend Australian
December 1, 2007 Saturday
All-round Country Edition

GEORGE Burchett denies he is trying to clear his father's much-maligned name. Instead, the Sydney-based artist insists, he has devoted a lot of time to editing a vast autobiography of Wilfred Burchett and has since co-edited a collection of his writings simply because he ''found it interesting''.

Wilfred Burchett is one of the most contentious names in the annals of foreign reportage. He has been roundly and regularly condemned as a communist, a communist sympathiser, a propagandist and a traitor. The Menzies government refused to renew his passport because of his activities during the Korean War in the early 1950s, when he covered the war from the communist north. Yet he is also widely admired for his audacity in sneaking into Hiroshima in the weeks after the bomb and writing about the strange plague annihilating the population.

The new book, Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, certainly makes it clear Burchett could write. His motivations, though, remain largely opaque. After the horrors of the Depression and fascism in Europe, many thoughtful people swung to the Left. But how far did Burchett swing and how much did he choose to overlook?

Burchett made a habit of being on the wrong side, according to many Australians. He reported on the Vietnam War from the north and he has been accused of complicity in extracting confessions from tortured prisoners of war in North Korea and Vietnam.

The torture allegations continue to drift around, George Burchett says, adding they are the most damaging of the many accusations levelled at his father. Yet he says it's all manufactured rubbish, directed by the personal enmity of ill-wishers.

''He was asked by the editor of The (Melbourne) Herald to find out whether an Australian prisoner of war was dead or alive,'' he says. ''Basically it was a favour to a fellow journalist. Then the US asked him to do the same for General Dinh -- the highest ranking prisoner of war in Vietnam -- to find out whether he was dead.'' So, George Burchett says, his father had contact with the prisoners, but he had no connection with torture.

Wilfred Burchett also claimed the US had dropped biological weapons -- via infected insects -- on North Korea and China in 1951 and 1952 during the Korean War, a claim that has drawn ridicule. Yet George says his father sincerely believed it was true: ''There was an international commission of scientists. They interviewed pilots who confessed to dropping the diseased insects.''

Burchett went to China in 1951. Australians weren't allowed in at the time, but he had a British passport. ''He went to write about the new China, Mao's China,'' his son says. ''He wrote two books on China, the first in 1951 just after the revolution, about the end of feudal China, and then in 1974 after the Cultural Revolution. It was still positive.''

The author and journalist wrote more than 40 books during his long and chequered career, and this latest collection of writings includes extracts from a number of them, selected after a close reading of his oeuvre.

''I actually realised I hadn't read my father at all,'' George Burchett says, speaking with an accent drawn from a childhood spent in Hanoi, Moscow, Phnom Penh and Paris. ''I used to dismiss it as propaganda. Now I more and more regard it as truth. It's like Iraq, the lies and deception. The more you dig, the scarier it is.''

Wilfred Burchett didn't return to live in Australia after his turbulent years in Asia and Europe. After his passport was restored by Gough Whitlam in 1972, he sued a Democratic Labor Party senator for defamation. But it was ruled protected under parliamentary privilege and costs were awarded against him, so he left and never returned.

He wasn't a card-carrying communist, his son says. ''He was a supporter of the anti-colonialist wars, which happened to be communist-led. More personally, he admired Ho Chi Minh and Zhou Enlai. But he became very disenchanted with China, particularly over its support for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.''

Now Wilfred Burchett's work and life is again under scrutiny, courtesy of his son's publishing endeavours. ''Two years ago we published the full version of his autobiography, which was quite successful, surprisingly, not just to clear his name but because we found it interesting,'' George Burchett says. Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist was published in 2005.

Some journalists and historians have written sincerely admiring pieces about Wilfred Burchett; John Pilger even contributed a foreword to this latest book. ''He took risks to smuggle Jews out of Nazi Germany, to drag American wounded to safety during the Pacific war and to seek out prisoners of war in Japan in 1945 to tell them help was coming,'' Pilger writes. ''He sustained a variety of bombardment, from Burma to Korea, to Indochina, yet he retained a compassion coupled with an innocence bordering at times on naivete. None of these qualities were shared with the vociferous few who worked to bring him down.''

Yet George Burchett concedes there are many others who have no time for his father. Robert Manne, he says, is generally a liberal-minded academic, but ''on Wilfred, he's Taliban''. He says Gerard Henderson's antipathy, though, is no surprise.

These days, George Burchett lives in the leafy Sydney suburb of Turramurra, in a quiet street where magpies call. He's a long way from the blood and toil of Indochina or the political cross-currents of the Soviet Union but he says he will continue to mine the rich lode of his father's work. There's a documentary in the pipeline.

Ross Fitzgerald reviews Rebel Journalism -- The Weekend Australian Review