While a reasonable number of Australian journalists travelled to the country when it was the Republic of China (1912-49) and subsequently wrote about their experiences (Rhodes Farmer’s Shanghai Harvest [1945] is a notable example), the more interesting memoirs are probably those that date from the decades after Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after which only a trickle of Western reporters were allowed to visit the country, under strict supervision from officious Chinese authorities.

Lisa Hobbs, Suzanne Baker, and Frederick Nossal – three Australian reporters who managed to visit communist China in the 1950s and 1960s – were captivated by the aura of Lo Wu. Hobbs, an experienced Australian journalist living and working in San Francisco, felt that she was about to enter ‘another world’ as she approached the Lo Wu border crossing. In 1965, Hobbs became the first female reporter from an American newspaper to visit mainland China since 1949. Hobbs, who published I Saw Red China in 1966, was able to use her Australian passport to overcome restrictions that applied to US journalists wanting to visit China.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Paul Raffaele, who became the first Australian journalist to be accredited by the People’s Republic of China when he opened the public broadcaster’s first bureau in Peking in October 1973, said he was nervous about being cut off from the ‘familiar outside world’. Baker, a television producer who was the first Australian woman to win an Academy Award, wrote in The Bulletin in March 1966 that she was about to ‘break through the bamboo curtain’.

Nossal, who said he felt ‘jaunty’ as he walked from Lo Wu to Shum Chum, described the small mainland village in his book Dateline Peking (1962) as ‘rather grim’. In 1959, Nossal, a thirty-one-year-old journalist from the Melbourne Herald, opened the first Western newspaper bureau in China since Mao’s victory. While Nossal was opening an office for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, his stories were run by his old Melbourne paper.

Suffering from ‘dry-mouth tension’, Kirwan Ward and Paul Rigby from the Daily News in Perth wrote in Willow Pattern Walkabout (1959) that crossing the rusting old railway bridge was a step ‘as startling as the one Lewis Carroll’s Alice made that drowsy summer afternoon when she stepped through the looking-glass’. Ward was a mainstay of the Daily News in Perth; his daily column, ‘Peepshow’, ran from 1946 until 1974. Rigby was a Walkley-winning cartoonist.

Back on the train and leaving Lo Wu behind, travelling in reserved seats draped with white antimacassars, the journalists got their first look at the ‘real’ China. The paddy fields sweeping past the train’s windows were a hundred shades of green, while loudspeakers on the trains crackled with patriotic songs. Baker thought the train ride to Peking felt like being in a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza. Raffaele reckoned he felt like a character in a John le Carré novel.

Wilfred Burchett approached his 1951 Lo Wu border crossing with the reverence of a quasi-religious pilgrimage. Burchett, who had previously reported from China for the London Daily Express in the early 1940s, was impressed that the ‘chaos and filth’ of the past had been replaced with ‘spotlessly clean’ railway carriages and ‘friendly, efficient service’. In his autobiographical At the Barricades (1981), Burchett said his first impressions of communist China remained valid for the rest of his lengthy trip.

Apart from the much-maligned Burchett, the first Australian journalist to report from communist China was probably Reg Leonard from the Melbourne Herald, who wrote a series of six features for The New York Times published in August 1956. The NYT ran two of these stories on its front page, including one based on a ninety-minute interview with China’s charismatic premier, Zhou Enlai.

Australian journalists have not been alone in writing up their Lo Wu reminiscences: there is a rich history of similar books written by American and European reporters who were keen to add their stories to this China-memoir oeuvre. Nor are such tomes limited to journalists, with missionaries, scientists, business people, and fellow-travelling cadres lining up to explain to readers the mystique of an awakening China.

Memoirs of China, with their shiny red covers, continue to appear, although the mystique of Lo Wu has long gone. Most new correspondents no longer start their Chinese odyssey by taking the slow train north from Lo Wu, with the point of entry now more likely to be gleaming new airports in metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Three new Australian books provide a modern take on this venerable genre. Their publication was largely predicated on Beijing’s decision in September 2020 to eject the correspondents of the ABC and the Australian Financial Review (AFR), leaving the Australian media without an on-the-ground presence in China for the first time since diplomatic relations between the two sides were established in 1972.

The Truth About China: Propaganda, patriotism and the search for answers by Bill Birtles

Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 310 pp

Bill Birtles from the ABC and Michael Smith from the AFR have completed their memoirs with alacrity, as have Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts, who have co-edited the third of these three new volumes. All four journalists have more than a passing knowledge of China. Birtles, author of The Truth About China: Propaganda, patriotism and the search for answers, had studied Mandarin and previously worked for the government-run Xinhua news agency in 2010, while Smith was a reporter for the Hong Kong Standard in 1997, when the former British colony was handed over to Beijing. The husband-and-wife team of Watson and Roberts was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.

Birtles and Smith both launch their narratives with accounts of the cloak-and-dagger operations conducted by Australian diplomats to spirit the two journalists out of the country. The Chinese government’s effort to expel them was hardly a surprise; Beijing has a long history of deporting journalists for writing what it regards as ‘unfair and false reports’.

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government was determined to expel NYT correspondent Hallett Abend from China in 1931, while Robert P.  Martin of the United Press received the same treatment in 1939. Expulsion of foreign journalists continued through the Mao Zedong era. As many as twenty foreign journalists were thrown out of China in 2020, including two other Australians: Chris Buckley from the NYT and Philip Wen from the Wall Street Journal.

The Beijing Bureau: 25 Australian correspondents reporting China’s rise by Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts

Hardie Grant Books, $32.99 pb, 303 pp)

The twenty-five texts included in Watson and Roberts’s The Beijing Bureau: 25 Australian correspondents reporting China’s rise are understandably skewed towards those with ABC authorship, given the breadth of the national carrier’s coverage of China over the past five decades. In terms of readability, the most accessible pieces are those that personalise their narrative. Jane Hutcheon and Helene Chung both have compelling personal stories to tell about their Chinese heritage.

Prominent in all three books is the frustration that goes with being a foreign correspondent in authoritarian China, then and now. Correspondents write of midnight visits to hotel rooms by Chinese police and other security officials, followed by hours of interrogation and the ubiquitous signed statements admitting their guilt. Phones are bugged; journalists need permission to venture outside Beijing and have little choice but to participate in ‘showcase’ tours and ‘sanitised’ trips.

Smith’s book is pessimistically titled The Last Correspondent: Dispatches from the frontline of Xi’s new China, which is surely a premature judgement on China’s intentions with respect to Australian journalists working in the country. Smith, Watson, and Roberts give the false impression that Australian media interest in China only became serious after diplomatic relations were established. Smith does his own newspaper a disservice by stating that it had only had a sixteen-year presence in China from 2004, when in fact AFR correspondents have been reporting on Chinese affairs from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei since the mid-1980s.

The Last Correspondent: Dispatches from the frontline of Xi’s new China by Michael Smith

Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 322 pp

It should also be remembered that serious Australian newspaper coverage of China did not start in 1949, as is suggested by Watson and Roberts, but rather goes back to the first newspaper published in Australia in March 1803, which included a story about Irish convict escapees convinced that China was within walking distance from the penal colony.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Australian colonial press maintained a strong interest in China. In 1841, The Sydney Morning Herald sent a correspondent to Amoy for a story about Chinese ‘coolie’ labour. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of Australian journalists travelled to China to report on the awakening Asian giant. With bylines still not in use in Victorian-era newspapers, what were then known as ‘special correspondents’ became drawcards for newspapers like The Argus in Melbourne, which boasted among its staff writers James Hingston and John Stanley James (the ‘Vagabond’).

Two Australian journalists – John Wallace from the SMH and George Watkin Wynne from the rival Telegraph – reported on the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899–1901, although most of the fighting was over by the time that they arrived. Banjo Paterson was also sent to China to report on the Boxer revolt, but arrived too late to cover the conflict. Paterson did at least secure an interview with the Geelong-born George ‘Chinese’ Morrison, who had become the first Western reporter to be based in Peking when he was appointed as correspondent for the Times of London in 1897. Morrison served as Peking bureau chief until 1912, when he resigned to become a political adviser to the infant Chinese republican government. There are serious question marks about the veracity of Morrison’s journalism and his political acumen; he was an accomplished self-promoter.

William Donald, a near contemporary of Morrison, also worked on newspapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai before becoming an adviser to Sun Yat-sen. The Lithgow-born teetotaller, who later worked for Kuomintang generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madam Soong Mei-ling, was described in a November 1946 obituary in the NYT as a ‘fabled’ old China hand ‘who had more influence on Chinese leaders than any other Occidental’.

China has been mesmerising Australian journalists since the colonial settlement of the early 1800s, notwithstanding the latest round of Beijing’s preferred ‘tit-for-tat’ public diplomacy. With Xi Jinping moving to solidify his position as the country’s new paramount leader, Beijing will no doubt continue to harass and expel those it thinks are acting against China’s sovereign interests. But as Bill Birtles, Michael Smith, and other journalists will attest, China is such a giving news story that the Western press has little choice but to go back for more.