Robin Gerster | |
---|---|
Born | 1953 (age 70–71) Melbourne, Victoria |
Awards | The Age Non-Fiction Award (1988) New South Wales Premier's Australian History Prize (2009) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Monash University (BA [Hons], MA, PhD) |
Thesis | Big-noting the Promotion of an Heroic Theme in Australian War Prose (1985) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Monash University University of Tokyo |
Main interests | Cultural histories of war and travel,Japan |
Notable works | Big-noting (1987) Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008) |
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.
Victoria University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is a dual-sector university, providing courses in both higher education and technical and further education (TAFE).
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial (AWM).
The 10th Division was a division of the Australian Army, which served briefly during World War II. It was initially formed on 15 April 1942 from the Militia units of the Newcastle Covering Force. However, personnel shortages led to the division being disbanded in August that year.
The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) was a small volunteer force of approximately 2,000 men, raised in Australia shortly after the outbreak of World War I to seize and destroy German wireless stations in German New Guinea in the south-west Pacific. The German wireless installations were ordered to be destroyed because they were used by Vizeadmiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron of the Imperial German Navy, which threatened merchant shipping in the region. Following the capture of German possessions in the region, the AN&MEF provided occupation forces for the duration of the war. New Zealand provided a similar force for the occupation of German Samoa.
Peter Charles Doherty is an Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Rolf M. Zinkernagel in 1996 and was named Australian of the Year in 1997. In the Australia Day Honours of 1997, he was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his work with Zinkernagel. He is also a National Trust Australian Living Treasure. In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Doherty's immune system research was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an iconic "innovation and invention".
The British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) was the British Commonwealth taskforce consisting of Australian, British, Indian and New Zealand military forces in occupied Japan, from 1946 until the end of occupation in 1952.
The 2/6th Battalion was an infantry battalion of the Australian Army that served during the Second World War. Raised in October 1939 as part of the all-volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force, the battalion formed part of the 6th Division and was among the first troops raised by Australia during the war. Departing Australia in early 1940, the 2/6th were deployed to the Middle East where in January 1941, it took part in the first action of the war by Australian ground forces, the Battle of Bardia, which was followed by further actions around Tobruk. Later, the 2/6th were dispatched to take part in the Battle of Greece, although they were evacuated after only a short involvement in the campaign. Some members of the battalion subsequently fought on Crete with a composite 17th Brigade battalion, and the battalion had to be re-formed in Palestine before being sent to Syria in 1941–42, where they formed part of the Allied occupation force that was established there in the aftermath of the Syria–Lebanon campaign.
Clifton Ernest Pugh AO, was an Australian artist and three-time winner of Australia's Archibald Prize. One of Australia's most renowned and successful painters, Pugh was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, and was known for his landscapes and portraiture. Important early group exhibitions include The Antipodeans, the exhibition for which Bernard Smith drafted a manifesto in support of Australian figurative painting, an exhibition in which Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman showed; a joint exhibition with Barry Humphries, in which the two responded to Dadaism; and Group of Four at the Victorian Artists Society Gallery with Pugh, John Howley, Don Laycock and Lawrence Daws.
Kenneth Stanley Inglis, was an Australian historian.
Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), also known as Special Operations Australia (SOA) and previously known as Inter-Allied Services Department (ISD), was an Australian military intelligence and special reconnaissance unit, during World War II.
Dr Judith Buckrich is a Melbourne author and past chair of the International PEN Women Writers' Committee. She is President of the PMI Victorian History Library.
Allied and Japanese troops committed a number of rapes during the Battle of Okinawa during the last months of the Pacific War and the subsequent Allied occupation of Japan. The Allies occupied Japan until 1952 following the end of World War II and Okinawa Prefecture remained under US governance for two decades after.
James McQueen was an Australian novelist and short story writer.
Cassandra Atherton is an Australian prose-poet, critic, and scholar. She is an expert on prose poetry, contemporary public intellectuals in academia, and poets as public intellectuals, especially hibakusha poets. She is married to historian Glenn Moore.
Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation in Japan is a history book by Robin Gerster dealing with the Australian contribution to the British Commonwealth Occupation Force.
Jo Chandler is an Australian journalist, science writer and educator. Her journalism has covered a wide range of subject areas, including science, the environment, women's and children's issues, and included assignments in Africa, the Australian outback, Antarctica, Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism and Honorary Fellow Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
Bruce Alexander Grant was an Australian journalist, foreign correspondent, government advisor, diplomat, novelist and author of several books on Australian politics and foreign policy.
Frederick Hadkinson Bromley was an English-born Australian trade unionist and early Labour leader in Victoria.
Alexander "Sasha" Dmitrievich Grishin is an Australian art historian, art critic and curator based in Victoria and Canberra. He is known as an art critic, and for establishing the academic discipline of art history at the Australian National University (ANU).
Mark McKenna is a professor of history at the University of Sydney, noted for his work on Aboriginal history, a biography of Manning Clark and the history of republicanism in Australia.
the first and only major twentieth-century monograph exploring Australian literary responses to the war
the provocative Legless in Ginza