Robin Gerster Explained

Robin Gerster
Birth Place:Melbourne, Victoria
Workplaces:Monash University
University of Tokyo
Alma Mater:Monash University (BA [Hons], MA, PhD)
Thesis Title:Big-noting the Promotion of an Heroic Theme in Australian War Prose
Thesis Year:1985
Main Interests:Cultural histories of war and travel, Japan
Major Works:Big-noting (1987)
Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008)
Awards:The Age Non-Fiction Award (1988)
New South Wales Premier's Australian History Prize (2009)

Robin Gerster is an Australian author who was born in Melbourne and educated in Melbourne and Sydney. Formerly a professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Gerster has written extensively on the cultural histories of war and travel, and on Western representations of Japan.[1] As a postgraduate, he won the Australian War Memorial's inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholarship, for a research project on Australian war literature. The PhD thesis that emerged from this research was later published as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing,[2] [3] which remains the landmark study in its field.[4] In 1988, it won The Age Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category. It has been criticised for not discussing women's roles in the war.[5]

In the 1990s he held the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo – an experience which led to the "provocative" travel book, Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan (1999).[6] His book, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan, won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction Book Award and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. It was republished in a new paperback edition, with an afterword, in 2019. Published in 2020, Hiroshima and Here: Reflections on Australian Atomic Culture is a cultural history of Nuclear Age Australia, focusing on the reverberating impact of the atomic bombings of August 1945, and the complexity of Australian responses to the fact and possibility of nuclear destruction.

Major works: author

Major works: editor

Notes and References

  1. Book: Stockings, C. . Bardia: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of Anzac . UNSW Press . A UNSW Press book . 2009 . 978-1-921410-25-3 . 6 June 2024 . 301.
  2. Book: Bourke, R. . Prisoners of the Japanese: Literary Imagination and the Prisoner-of-war Experience . University of Queensland Press . 2006 . 978-0-7022-3564-1 . 2024-06-06 . 2.
  3. Book: Hirst, J. . Sense & Nonsense in Australian History . ReadHowYouWant.com, Limited . 2015 . 978-1-4587-9857-2 . 6 June 2024 . 224.
  4. Book: Das . D. . Dasgupta . S. . Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing . Springer International Publishing . 2017 . 978-3-319-50400-1 . 6 June 2024 . the first and only major twentieth-century monograph exploring Australian literary responses to the war. 42.
  5. Book: Coates, D. . Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women's war fictions . Sydney University Press . Sydney Studies in Australian Literature . 2023 . 978-1-74332-925-2 . 2024-06-06 . 27.
  6. Book: Darian-Smith . K. . Lowe . D. . The Australian Embassy in Tokyo and Australia–Japan Relations . ANU Press . 2023 . 978-1-76046-540-7 . 2024-06-06 . the provocative Legless in Ginza. 222.

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