AustLit

'The remarkable foreign correspondent Wilfred Burchett was given many labels in the mid-twentieth century — traitor, spy, communist sympathiser — but he called himself a heretic.

'He considered heresy to be a trait inherited from his distinguished ancestors, and his passion for heresy was devoid of prejudice: he could celebrate the Eastern bloc heretic Stefan Heym for 'tilting his very able pen at the bureaucratic stupidities ... of the building of socialism', as easily as he lauded the heresies of his American friends disenfranchised by McCarthy. Burchett was generous to such a degree that he was even admired by detractors such as Australian journalist Denis Warner, who in a report quoted by ASIO described him as courageous, careless of his own safety, gifted in languages and with women. The magnitude of Burchett's gifts were not appreciated in Australia during his lifetime, but this epic, global eyewitness account of wars and the struggle for peace in the decades after Hitler should enable us to revisit Burchett more compassionately. '(Introduction)