Robin Gerster
Robin Gerster is an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He is the author of Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (1987) and several other works, including Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the occupation of Japan (2008), and (with Melissa Miles) Pacific Exposures: Photography and the Australia–Japan relationship (ANU Press, 2018). His latest book is Hiroshima and Here: Reflections on Australian atomic culture (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).
‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.’ The American reporter Michael Herr thus concluded his celebrated work Dispatches (1977), confident that his readers understood what he meant, even if most of them had never set foot in the country. The very word possessed an almost incantatory power. In the United States, as in Australia, opposition to the military intervention and its cross-f ... (read more)
You have to admire the professional writer who describes the chore of churning out the daily ration of words as 'like straining shit through a sock', though this may not have been the quotation for which Alan Moorehead would have chosen to be remembered. At the time he was Australia's most internationally celebrated writer, known for both his apparently effortless prose and the range of his subjec ... (read more)