Murray-Smith, Stephen, 1922-1988.

There's no iron curtain : an Australian journalist in Eastern Europe / by Stephen Murray-Smith. (Melbourne : International Bookshop, 1952)

Stephen Murray-Smith served as a commando in New Guinea during the war. He joined the Communist Party and worked in Prague with a Communist news agency from 1948 to 1951. It was from his time in Czechoslovakia that he gathered material for this account of life in Eastern Europe under Communist control.

The first section is headed "This Iron Curtain business". He concludes,

That the Iron Curtain then IS a reality, but it is an Iron Curtain shutting us off from people like the Czechs, not them from us. One of my last jobs in Czechoslovakia was to prepare for publication by the Czechoslovak youth organisation a volume of Henry Lawson's short stories, and for the Czechoslovak Trade Union movement a History of Australian Trade Unionism. The Czechoslovak workers and young people demanded these books. Who dare say that the Iron Curtain is imposed from that side of the fence in view of facts like that? (p. 9)

Stephen Murray-Smith later became the editor of the Australian left-wing literary magazine, Overland.