Robin Gerster

Robin Gerster
Born	1953 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 title	Big-noting the promotion of an heroic theme in Australian war prose
Thesis year	1985
Academic work
Institutions	Monash University University of Tokyo
Main interests	Cultural histories of war and travel
Notable works	Big-noting (1987) Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008)

Robin Gerster (born 1953) is an Australian author and academic. He is a Professor at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. His major fields of expertise are the cultural histories of war and travel. As a postgraduate, he won the Australian War Memorial's inaugural C.E.W. Bean Scholarship, for his research project on the heroic theme in Australian war writing. The PhD-thesis which 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 prestigious The Age Book of the Year Award in the non-fiction category.

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.

Bibliography

• Occupying the Other: Australia and Military Occupations from Japan to Iraq, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle UK, 2009. (Co-editor with Christine de Matos.)
• Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan', Scribe, Melbourne, 2008.
• On the Warpath: A Critical Anthology of Australian Military Travel, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2004. (Co-editor with Peter Pierce)
• Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1999.
• Hotel Asia: Australian Literary Travelling to 'the East' , Penguin, Ringwood, 1995.
• Seizures of Youth: 'The Sixties' and Australia, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1991.
• Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1987. Revised paperback ed., MUP, 1992.