Lexington Books
Pages: 244
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-4985-8759-4 • Hardback • September 2020 • $105.00 • (£81.00)
978-1-4985-8760-0 • eBook • September 2020 • $45.00 • (£77.00)
Robin Gerster is professor in the School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
Introduction: Exile on Uranium Street
Part I: The Aftermath
Chapter 1: Hiroshima around the Corner: Payback and Portent
Chapter 2: Going to Ground Zero: Australians in Occupied Japan
Part II: Australia's Place in the Nuclear Empire
Chapter 3: Our Atomic Home: the 1950s
Chapter 4: The Nuclear Blues: Since the 1960s
Part III: Commemoration and Prophecy
Chapter 5: Hiroshima Revisited: Remembering and Representing “the Bomb”
Chapter 6: Doom Town: Imagining the Nuclear Destruction of Australian Cities
Conclusion: Apocalypse, and Other Ends
Gerster deftly tracks the murky and contradictory path of ‘atomic Australia’ through embodied, imaginary, and political culture. Gerster unearths a uranium-like vein woven beneath the continent’s veneer, braiding it to the history and ecology of the whole world.
— Robert A. Jacobs, Hiroshima City University
In a major contribution to nuclear studies, Robin Gerster controversially demonstrates the deep ties between Hiroshima and Australia. Gerster’s rich and thought provoking volume draws on years of engagement with Australia’s nuclear history. . . . (to) examine the fascinatingly complex cultural response of Australia to the nuclear world.
— Ran Zwigenberg, Pennsylvania State University
Unique in its range and coverage, Hiroshima and Here sets the gold standard for exploring Australia’s complex Atomic Age experience. A comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Australia’s nuclear episteme, Gerster’s narrative effortlessly melds ethnographic observation, dark tourism, personal anecdote and incisive analysis across the spectrum of radiological impacts intersecting Australia’s nuclear trajectory and shifting geopolitics past, present and future.
— Mick Broderick, Murdoch University