Travels in Atomic Sunshine
Robin Gerster
Author Events
Robin Gerster's Travels in Atomic Sunshine will be launched in Melbourne at the Shrine of Remembrance by Professor Bruce Scates.
'In a rich meeting of history and literature, Gerster explores the big issues of race, culture, and national identity as victor and vanquished meet in the aftermath of a world war. The love, betrayal, greed, generosity, compassion, and casual brutality of individuals are his evidence and the strength of his narrative.'
Hank Nelson'Robin Gerster's brilliant account of the little-known story of Australia's occupation force provides new, and often unsettling, insights into Australian responses to Japan and the Japanese at the end of the Second World War. Amid the atomic wasteland of Hiroshima, Australians and Japanese fraternized across the barriers of language, history, and different wartime experiences.
Gerster's evocative cultural history of Australian–Japanese relations is as hard-hitting as it is perceptive.'
Kate Darian-Smith'Drawing extensively on diary entries, papers and personal interviews with Australian soldiers, Gerster paints an intricate portrait of the moral and cultural disorientation felt by the Aussie ‘conquerors’ as they came to terms with not only an enemy decimated by atomic horror but also their own inherent prejudices ... the book is an immense achievement of research and a timely reminder of the tightrope balance of foreign occupation, a message that has particular relevance in today’s post-9/11 climate. It will be particularly popular among avid history readers looking for a new angle on the wartime Australian experience.'
(Bookseller & Publisher)In February 1946, the Australians of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) moved into western Japan to ‘demilitarise and democratise’ the atom-bombed backwater of Hiroshima Prefecture. For over six years, up to 20,000 Australian servicemen, including their wives and children, participated in an historic experiment in nation-rebuilding dominated by the United States and the occupation’s supreme commander, General MacArthur.
It was to be a watershed in Australian military history and international relations. BCOF was the last collective armed gesture of a moribund empire. The Chifley government wanted to make Australia’s independent presence felt in post-war Asia-Pacific affairs, yet the venture heralded the nation’s enmeshment in American geopolitics. This was the forerunner of the today’s peacekeeping missions and engagements in contentious US-led military occupations.
Yet the occupation of Japan was also a compelling human experience. It was a cultural reconnaissance — the first time a large number of Australians were able to explore in depth an Asian society and country. It was an unprecedented domestic encounter between peoples with apparently incompatible traditions and temperaments. Many relished exercising power over a despised former enemy, and basked in the ‘atomic sunshine’ of American Japan. Yet numerous Australians developed an intimacy with the old enemy, which put them at odds with the ‘Jap’ haters back home, and became the trailblazers of a new era of bilateral friendship.
Travels in Atomic Sunshine is a salutary study of the neocolonialism of foreign occupation, and of Australia’s characteristic ambivalence about the Asian region.
'elegant and sardonic history ...'
Hamish McDonald (Sydney Morning Herald)Robin Gerster
Robin Gerster is the author of several books, including Big-noting: the heroic theme in Australian war writing (1987), Hotel Asia (1995), and Legless in Ginza: orientating Japan (1999). In the 1990s he taught at the University of Tokyo, holding the Chair in Australian Studies. He is currently Associate Professor in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, and lives in Melbourne with his wife and two sons.
Extent: 336 +8pp photographs
Size: 234mm x 153mm
ISBN (13): 9781921215346
RRP: $49.95
Pub date: November 2008
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