— THE OUTSIDERS: WILFRED BURCHETT JOHN PILGER, HUGH MUNRO
THE POWER OF THE DOCUMENTARY: BREAKING THE SILENCE thepowerofthedocumentary.com.au A FILM FESTIVAL CURATED BY JOHN PILGER The Outsiders: Wilfred Burchett —
Presenter: Sound: In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the convoy in which my film Although denounced in Australia by the John Pilger Dave Denness, atomic bombing of Japan in August crew and I were travelling in Cambodia. right-wing as a traitor and even denied Director: Greg Ade 1945, the official lying began. The When it happened, we were ready.’ a passport by the Liberal government, Hugh Munro Recommended rating: Allied occupation authorities banned Burchett's reporting from the communist Production company: PG all mention of radiation poisoning and Burchett grew up in Gippsland, in rural bloc provided rare insights into what was Tempest Films Colour, 27 mins insisted that the victims in Hiroshima Victoria, the son of a Methodist minister. for most Western journalists a forbidden Producer: UK, 1983 and Nagasaki had been killed or He was 19 at the beginning of the Great world – such as North Korea when the Jacky Stoller injured only by the atomic blast. ‘No Depression, which marked him for life. In war between the North and South, and Camera: radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin’ said the his autobiography At the Barricades, he the United States and China, broke out John Duncum, front page of the New York Times, a wrote that during his wartime reporting in 1950. ‘I didn’t have any particular Peter Milic classic of disinformation and journalistic behind the lines in Vietnam he would ‘thank sympathy with North Korea,’ he says, ‘but abdication. There was one exception: the his lucky stars’ his legs had found their what I saw was the danger of another Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett. strength as a young man looking for work. world war developing out of that.’
‘I write this as a warning to the world,’ In The Outsiders, Pilger’s 1983 TV interview He reported from Moscow, Beijing, the reported Burchett in the London Daily series, Burchett describes Hiroshima in Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh Express, having reached Hiroshima after 1945 as ‘a city steamrollered’. ‘I was in a and, famously, from Vietnam alongside a perilous journey across Japan, the first state of permanent shock,’ he says. His first the National Liberation Front, which reporter to dare. Burchett described dispatch was sent to London via Morse the Americans called the Vietcong. He hospital wards filled with people with code and was the scoop of the century. marched and rode on a bicycle down the no visible injuries, who were dying from For good measure, reported the Brisbane Ho Chi Minh Trail, survived bombing and what he called ‘an atomic plague’. For Courier-Mail, ‘armed with a typewriter, witnessed, in villages and underground telling this truth, his press accreditation seven packets of K rations, a Colt revolver shelters and hospitals, a people's was withdrawn, he was pilloried and and incredible hope, [Burchett] “liberated” resistance to the invasion of a superpower. smeared – and vindicated. five Allied prison-of war camps’. He recalls Ho Chi Minh as ‘the greatest man I’ve ever met, with all the modesty and John Pilger first met Wilfred Burchett Pilger describes Wilfred Burchett as ‘the simplicity that goes with human greatness’. in Vietnam in the 1970s. ‘I have never only Western journalist to consistently These were qualities that might well known a journalist so at ease in a different report events from the other side in the describe Wilfred Burchett, who died shortly culture,’ he said. ‘Wilfred's empathy with Korean War and the Cold War, and from after this television interview, aged 72. the people of Asia was matched by his China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam’. remarkable knowledge and understanding Bertrand Russell had written, ‘If any one Anthony Hayward of the past and present, and his sense of man is responsible for alerting Western Journalist and author comradeship. I may owe him my life. He opinion to the struggle of the people of warned me about a planned Khmer Rouge Vietnam, it is Wilfred Burchett.’