Career
In 1936 Burchett left Australia for London. There he found work in travel agency which resettled Jews from Nazi Germany in British Palestine and the United States. In November 1938 he travelled to Berlin on behalf of his employers, the Jewish travel agency Palestine & Orient Lloyd Ltd, and arranged passages to Australia for thirty-six German Jews.
The Burchetts moved to Australia, arriving in July 1939. Disturbed by the locals’ apathy towards Nazism, he sent letters and articles to Melbourne newspapers, warning of Hitler’s planned European conquest. His letters were not published by the newspapers.
Burchett was the first journalist to report from the site of the atomic devastation at Hiroshima in 1945. He saw first hand the effects of the nuclear explosion, which he relayed in a story that appeared in the 6th September 1945 edition of the Daily Express
In 1951, Burchett travelled to the People's Republic of China as a foreign correspondent for the French Communist newspaper L'Humanité. After six months in China he wrote China's Feet Unbound, which supported the new Chinese government of Mao Zedong.
In 1955 Burchett lost the British passport on which he had always travelled. He applied for an Australian one and requested that his and Vessa’s two children be registered as Australian citizens. The government rejected both applications. In 1957 he was appointed the New York National Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow. He also resumed reporting (as `Andrew Wilson’) for the Daily Express; additionally, from 1960 he wrote for the London Financial Times.
Burchett went to Vietnam in 1962, travelling solo through the South and then with the Viet Cong for most of 1963 and 1964. During this time, Burchett wrote books on the conflicts, including, My Visit to the Liberated Zones of South Vietnam (1964) and articles that revealed the true details about the American use of chemical warfare. He even contributed to the making of multiple films in North Vietnam for French TV, called Hanoi Under The Bombs, as well as a series of interviews.