In 1982, the year before he died, the autobiography of the Australian journalist and exile Wilfred Burchett was published. Trenchantly titled At the Barricades, it placed him as a journalist engagé, in the frontline, partisan. More than two decades later, a typescript more than twice that length was brought back from Bulgaria, birthplace of Burchett’s second wife, Vessa, by their son George. Edited by the latter and by Nick Shimmin, it has now been published in handsome and massive form by the University of New South Wales Press. Yet the title and subtitle seem more equivocal than the shorter first version, and indeed prove to be so. Now we have Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist: The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, which intends to give Australians with any knowledge of his remarkable career a fresh means for judgment.
The book’s intriguing and provoking cover photograph is simply captioned ‘Wilfred Burchett in Korea, 1951’. Crouching, notes in hand, he is speaking to a man who is almost out of the picture. Was this one of the American POWs whom, notoriously, he was alleged to have brainwashed, and whose torture he may have condoned? The image yields only ambiguity. As for the title: was Burchett a rebel in the sense of not conforming to the wishes of press barons and governments? Or was he a political rebel in Western terms, a communist or agent of the KGB, whose real professional mission was masked by his reporting from so many of the world’s hot spots for four decades? Moreover, to have done so at a time when their crises were most acute? Finally, what kind of ‘autobiography’ is this? There can be a preliminary answer: one of the most protean ever written in Australia.
These memoirs begin in the most calculatedly disarming manner. The author poses this question: ‘Is heresy an inherited or an acquired characteristic?’ The answer comes in deterministic terms. Burchett’s first couple of decades shaped the heretic, the enemy of Empire, the friend of collective workers’ action. He has written, in the book’s first hundred pages, an autobiography in classical Australian mode. After a parody of genealogical inquiry, which leads him briefly back to England, Burchett tells of the honest travails of his parents and extended family—as Melbourne builders, and on a selection at Poowong in Gippsland. Young Wilfred learned the discipline of rural work; was encouraged in his education; was