Of the bomb - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 9: Up North
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Matthew Condon
WILFRED BURCHETT DIED IN 1983. TO THIS DAY, HIS CAREER, writing and actions still cause fierce debate and argument, particularly his reporting from Vietnam in the 1960s. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in him and his work. To mark the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, Melbourne University Press will publish the full, previously unseen version of Burchett's memoir, At the Barricades. Publisher and editor Nick Shimmin worked with Burchett's son, Sydney artist George Burchett, on the manuscript double the size of the 341-page published version.
Shimmin's introduction to the book notes: "Wilfred Burchett was the greatest journalist Australia has ever produced, and one of the best foreign correspondents the world has ever seen. Merely to make such a claim will arouse the ire of those who have sustained decades-long, vitriolic attacks on him and his legacy, but this volume goes some considerable way to justify the claim and refute the calumny which has been piled upon Burchett over the last 50 years. The pages that follow were written by Wilfred around 1980, shortly before he died. Less than half of what he wrote in this memoir was published in 1982 as At the Barricades, but the publishers on that occasion saw fit to remove much of what was most interesting in the text.
"The idea of publishing the book arose two years ago. I had met Wilfred's son, George, 15 years ago when I joined him working for Australia's multicultural broadcaster, the Special Broadcasting Service. Years of discussions about the state of the world became increasingly dismayed as we observed the behaviour of governments after 9/11, until on one occasion George mentioned that much of what was happening now reminded him a great deal of what his father had described, particularly during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And the seed was sown.
"Considering the sad role played by the media in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and the blatant lies and deceptions of the ‘coalition of the willing' and its spin doctors, it is a good time to revisit a previous generation of ‘dissident' journalists who challenged the official line and, in Wilfred's case, paid a heavy price. Many of those who vilified him in the later part of his career are still writing, still locked into the ideological blinkers of the Cold War. For them, despite the evidence of this book and so much more, Burchett will always be a name which provokes irrational hatred. But anyone with a more open mind, tolerant sympathies and a desire for the truth will read this book with fascination and admiration."
Knightley recalled the first time he met Burchett: "In the early 1970s, I was working in London on a book about war correspondents (eventually published as The First Casualty). I had reached the Pacific theatre in World War II and had a long list of war correspondents I would need to interview. Wilfred Burchett was at the top of the list. But how to find him? Some said he was living in Paris; others said Sofia or Moscow or Beijing. After all, he covered many countries. Then I went one night to a party in Battersea and there he was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room, drink in hand, holding forth on the state of the world while a group of young admirers sat on the floor entranced."
Alex Mitchell, former foreign correspondent and state political editor for the Sydney newspaper The Sun-Herald, was initially enamoured with the legend of Burchett. "I met him for the last time in 1978 at a bar in Paris to discover what he knew about the 1940 assassination of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Fourth International. I have nothing but admiration for his journalistic skills (when he was practising the craft in its purest sense as he did when covering Hiroshima) and for his tenacity to ‘get the story' and ‘be on the spot' where it was happening. Many of his books and writings remain extraordinarily valuable for historical research, but much of his work was unadulterated propagandising for the Stalinist bureaucracies of Moscow and Peking. I believe you can admire the man but remain hostile to his political beliefs. My chief contempt is for today's press parasites who sit in judgement on Burchett. None of them have been anywhere or done anything. They are intellectual midgets by comparison."
Burchett's son, George, told me his father never spoke of the Hiroshima experience at home. "Not because he avoided the subject, but because conversation around the table was usually about current events," he said. "When he told stories from the past, they were usually stories about him growing up in rural Australia or entertaining anecdotes from the past. Wilfred was great fun to be with and, as he was away a lot, there was usually a lot of catching up to do before he ‘hit the road again'.
"Hiroshima was, without doubt, the defining moment in Burchett's journalistic career. For Wilfred, Hiroshima marked several fundamental shifts. It was the end of the ‘good war' – World War II – and a preview of what WW III would be like. That he ‘de-embedded' himself from the press pack to follow his instincts and make his way to Hiroshima is a measure of his impeccable professional instincts. That he grasped the significance of the event and wrote the prophetic lines: ‘I write this as a warning to the world' is a measure of his ability to grasp the significance of events, not merely report them. That, despite carrying fragments of Japanese shrapnel in his leg for the rest of his life, he wrote with compassion about the victims of the bomb, is a measure of his humanity.
"Is Wilfred Burchett relevant today? You bet! Just think of Iraq, all the lies that got us there and the role of a complacent press in peddling the official line."
Novelist Rodney Hall once told me that he cared little for historical research when he wrote historical fiction. What does it matter, he said, if a cartwheel has 10 spokes or 12? He was saying that capturing feeling was more important than the accretion of detail; that you can travel in time and take readers into the past, through intuition, via the heart and the mind, without the obstruction of an undergrowth of useless facts.
Writing a fictional account of someone who actually lived presents an enormous amount of entrenched undergrowth. The path is hindered by sentiment, real memories, active debate. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of Wilfred Burchetts fully rounded and set in the minds of family, acquaintances, colleagues. There are Burchetts formed by opposing ideologies, based on his actions and his work and opinions. There are ASIO papers that sketch one Burchett and soon-to-be-read pages of his own autobiography that will produce another.
My Wilfred Burchett is starting to step into the light as well, but he's just a pencil outline on the far side of a dense field. I like to think he's free of the baggage he accrued through the course of a life. He's not a legend and he's not a traitor. He's just a young man following his instinct on a news story, perhaps the only pure story of his career. But how to get through the field?
THE OLD JAPANESE MAN IN THE FLOPPY-BRIMMED HAT rose slowly from his seat as the tram approached his stop near the hospital that day in Hiroshima.
"Very good to meet you," he said, and he shook my hand.
I held that old hand perhaps longer than courtesy expects. He smiled and clutched his carry bag and stepped onto the platform.
As the doors to the tram closed I watched him take a few steps and turn to face the window of my carriage. I looked at his right hand folded over the small bag. I had shaken that hand. I had shaken the hand of an atomic bomb survivor in Hiroshima. I thought, perhaps romantically, that I had touched history.
I looked at him through the window and it made me think of reporting and history and even life. Only on rare occasions do we see something not through a pane of glass. Mount Fuji through the plane window. The Japanese countryside through the bullet train window. Hiroshima through the tram window.
How do we truly see? How do we presuppose to see anything as it really is, without the filter of the glass – not just landscapes and city vistas, but how people are thinking? How they really are?
The tram started to move off. Just before he disappeared from view, the old man of the atom bomb raised his left arm, opened his palm and held it there.
It was a kind of salute, from one stranger to another. A gesture which suggested that, in the end, we are all just human beings together.
On my last night, the air-conditioning in my room in the Hiroshima Green Hotel was chugging inconsistently, and I sweltered until morning. When I woke, the pillow was drenched, and inexplicably covered in the brown and black tidemarks of my sweat. I spent my last hour in Hiroshima trying repeatedly to wash the ugly stains from the pillowslip in the bathroom sink, but they wouldn't disappear. ♦