Wilfred Burchett

Wilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist. He was known for being the first western journalist to report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. He also reported on the trials in Hungary, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and on Cambodia under Pol Pot. He played a role in prompting the first significant Western relief to Cambodia after its liberation by Vietnam in 1979.

About Wilfred Burchett in brief

Summary Wilfred BurchettWilfred Graham Burchett was an Australian journalist. He was known for being the first western journalist to report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. He also reported on the trials in Hungary, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and on Cambodia under Pol Pot. He played a role in prompting the first significant Western relief to Cambodia after its liberation by Vietnam in 1979. His reporting antagonised both the US and Australian governments and he was effectively exiled from Australia for almost 20 years before the incoming Whitlam government granted him a new passport. His Morse code dispatch was printed on the front page of the Daily Express newspaper in London on 5 September 1945. On this day he wrote: ‘I Write This as a Warning to the World, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world. In Hiroshima, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly uninjured by the unknown something – from an unknown something. It does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster had passed over it and squashed it out of existence’ He was incorrectly given as ‘Peter’ by Peter Burchetto, who had imposed restrictions on journalists’ access to bombed cities, and had censored reports of the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He died in Melbourne on 2 November 2013. He is buried in the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill.

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