Robin Gerster

Robin Gerster (born 1953) is an Australian author and academic. He is a Professor at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His major fields of expertise are the cultural histories of war and travel, and Western representations of Japan. As a postgraduate, he won the Australian War Memorial's inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholarship, for his research project on Australian war literature. The PhD thesis that emerged from this research was subsequently published as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, which remains the landmark study in its field. In 1988, it won The Age Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category.

Robin Gerster
Born	1953 (age 66–67) 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)

In the 1990s he held the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo – an experience which led to the controversial travel book, Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan (1999). 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.

Bibliography

Author

• — (1987). Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0522843360.
  • — (1992). Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Revised paperback ed. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0522845010.
• —; Bassett, Jan (1991). Seizures of Youth: The Sixties and Australia. South Yarra, Victoria: Hyland House. ISBN 0947062750.
• — (1999). Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 052284863X.
• — (2008). Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan. Melbourne: Scribe. ISBN 9781921215346.
  • — (2019). Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan. New paperback ed. with afterword. Melbourne: Scribe. ISBN 9781925849370.
• —; Miles, Melissa (2018). Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia–Japan Relationship. Canberra: ANU Press. ISBN 9781760462543.

Editor

• —, ed. (1995). Hotel Asia: Australian Literary Travelling to 'the East'. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. ISBN 0140245421.
• —; Pierce, Peter, eds. (2004). On the Warpath: An Anthology of Australian Military Travel. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0522850871.
• —; de Matos, Christine, eds. (2009). Occupying the "Other": Australia and Military Occupations from Japan to Iraq. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 9781443803397.