 |
| Wilfred Burchett and Ho Chi Minh |
President Truong Tan Sang feted members of Mr Burchett's family in the presidential palace in the lead-up to an exhibition of 100 of his photographs in Hanoi.
Heaping unusually high praise on a foreigner, Mr Truong referred to Burchett's bravery and contribution to Vietnam's ''liberation and reunification''.
In Australia, where Burchett was treated as a traitor by successive conservative governments but as a courageous independent war correspondent by others, the September 16 anniversary went unnoticed.
Burchett's son George, a Sydney artist who organised the exhibition, said the red carpet was literally rolled out as Vietnam's female revolutionary hero Nguyen Thi Binh cut a ribbon at the exhibition opening at Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh Museum.
High-ranking communist officials attended the function.
''It's wonderful to see my old man honoured and respected in a country of heroes,'' Mr Burchett told the Herald.
Asked why his father's memory was respected more in Vietnam than Australia, Mr Burchett said Wilfred was seen as a great friend of Vietnam.
''By helping rally world opinion against the war it could be argued that he made a substantial contribution to the United States and its allies losing the war,'' Mr Burchett said.
''He was one of the first to argue that the US could never win the war so one could also argue that had the US and its allies listened to voices like those of Wilfred Burchett, many hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved on both sides.''
The exhibition starts with images taken in 1954 when Burchett met Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's revolutionary hero and former prime minister and president, at his jungle headquarters.
The exhibition also displays Burchett's photos of General Vo Nguyen Giap, one of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century, who oversaw the defeat of both the French and the US and its allies. General Giap last month celebrated his 100th birthday in Hanoi hospital, still alert although frail and suffering respiratory problems. Only days earlier the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, had declared him dead while speaking at a Vietnam Remembrance Day ceremony in Canberra.
The Burchett photo exhibition at the most visited museum in Vietnam includes wall-sized photographs of Ho Chi Minh.
George Burchett, who is now working as an artist in Hanoi, said what touched him most about the photographs was that they showed ordinary people doing extraordinary things while retaining their humanity.
''The other moving moment was to meet people from some of the photos, including my old nanny,'' he said.
George, the second of three of Wilfred's children by his Bulgarian second wife Vessa, strongly defended his father, saying, ''he was a man of the world, a wonderful person and they called him a traitor, a KGB agent, a torturer, a brainwasher and a Stalinist hack''.
Australian governments refused for 17 years to issue a new passport for Wilfred Burchett when he mysteriously went missing in 1955.
He was even refused entry into his own country to attend his father's funeral.
An Australian passport was finally issued to Mr Burchett by the incoming Whitlam government in 1972.
The author of 35 books, Wilfred Burchett was accused of having communist sympathies over his coverage of the Korean and Vietnam wars. He was the first foreign correspondent to enter Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb that contributed to the end of World War II.
''Atomic plague: I write this as a warning to the world,'' he filed to the Daily Express in London.
1 comment:
About time! A sound article by SMH
cheers Scarlett
Post a Comment