Robin Gerster

Orientating Japan

Legless in Ginza

An engagingly readable, entertaining yet scholarly survey of the Australian war mythology. An adventurous, but meticulous study . . . this is a book that bayonets a too-long-held myth. - Judges' Report, 1988 Age Book of the Year . . . the most incisive, comprehensive and controversial account so far to appear of Australian literature of war . . . carries out a neglected task of literary and cultural history. - Peter Pierce Age . . . a brave argument and a brave book . . . a beautifully written book . . . you'll never feel quite the same about Anzac or Gallipoli again. - Judith Smart Victorian Historical Journal Gerster's central heresy . . . deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. The book should be bought at the shop rather than burned at the stake. - Mark Thomas Canberra Times

The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing

Big-noting

Melissa Miles

Photography has been a key means by which Australians have sought to define their relationships with Japan. From the fascination with all things Japanese in the late nineteenth century, through the era of ‘White Australia’, the bitter enmity of the Pacific War, the path to reconciliation in the post-war period and the culturally complicated bilateralism of today, Australians have used their cameras to express a divided sense of conflict and kinship with a country that has by turns fascinated and infuriated. The remarkable photographs collected and discussed here for the first time shed new light on the history of Australia’s engagement with its most important regional partner. Pacific Exposures argues that photographs tell an important story of cultural production, response and reaction—not only about how Australians have pictured Japan over the decades, but how they see their own place in the Asia-Pacific. ‘Pacific Exposures presents the first study of the photographic exchanges between Australia and Japan—its photographers, personalities, motivations, anxieties and tensions—based on a diverse range of archival materials, interviews, and well-chosen photographs.’ — Dr Luke Gartlan, University of St Andrews ‘[Pacific Exposures] will become a key text on Australia’s interactions with Japan, and the way that photographs can inform cross-cultural relations through their production, consumption and circulation.’ — Prof. Kate Darian-Smith, University of Tasmania

Photography and the Australia–Japan Relationship

Pacific Exposures

A vivid, salutary study of Australia’s little-known participation in the post-war occupation of Japan. 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 one of the last collective armed gestures 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. But 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.

Robin Gerster

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