Professor Robin Gerster is a 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow in Japan Studies, supported by the Harold S. Williams Trust.

About Professor Robin Gerster's Fellowship research

The Australian businessman and historian Harold S. Williams is known for his research into the impact of the foreign arrivals who helped facilitate Japan's transition from feudalism to modernity, after its opening up to the West in the 1850s. Williams's own life and career in Japan spanned almost seventy years, ending with his death in Kobe in 1987.

Equally at home in his ambiguous position as both insider and outsider, Williams sought to entrench the historical place of the foreigner ('gaijin') in the local landscape. Appropriately enough, he achieved this by an almost obsessional interest in visiting and describing the grave sites of those foreigners who ventured to Japan, and never left. 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow Professor Robin Gerster will look into the life of Harold S. Williams as discovered through his manuscript and other collections held at the National Library.

About Professor Robin Gerster

Professor Robin Gerster has published prolifically on the cultures of war and travel, and on Australian interactions with Asia. Among his books are the award winners Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan (2008), and Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing (1987). Other works include the Japan travel book Legless in Ginza (1999) and the co-written study of photography and the Australia-Japan relationship, Pacific Exposures (2018). His latest book is Hiroshima and Here (2020), a cultural history of Australian responses to nuclear energy and weaponry, and threat of nuclear war.

About National Library of Australia Fellowships

The National Library of Australia Fellowships program offers researchers an opportunity to undertake a 12-week residency at the Library. This program is supported by generous donors and bequests.