With support from Principal Patron Jane Hemstritch AO, Wilfred Burchett’s papers have been made available on Trove. 

Born in Australia in 1911, Wilfred Burchett was a pioneering Australian journalist who travelled and wrote extensively throughout his life. Arriving in London in 1937, he became a travel agent, notably arranging passage for 36 German Jews from Nazi Germany to Australia. He subsequently published accounts of his travels in the Pacific before becoming a war correspondent in China, India, Burma, and the Pacific.

After the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima he was possibly the first Western journalist to report the effects of the atomic bombs on the Japanese population. After this, his political sympathies became anti-American and pro-Communist. He reported from behind the Iron Curtain, and covered the Korean war from the Communist side. In 1955 Burchett’s British passport was cancelled, and the Menzies government refused his request for an Australian one. His attempts to be reinstated became the subject of the first volume of his memoirs, Passport, published in 1969. The Whitlam government eventually relented, granting him an Australian passport.

Burchett later reported extensively on the Vietnam war, the struggles for national liberation in Africa, the genocide in Cambodia, and the politics of communist China, producing a second volume of biography, At the Barricade, published in 1980. He died in Bulgaria in 1983.

Burchett is a distinctively radical voice in twentieth-century Australian writing, and his extensive manuscript papers give a remarkable insight not only into his own remarkable life, but also into the history of the Cold War as seen at first hand. A prolific journalist and the author of more than thirty books, Burchett’s papers include correspondence, notes, draft articles and book manuscripts, press cuttings, research materials, and more.

We are grateful to Principal Patron Jane Hemstritch AO for enabling us to share these papers on Trove.