Robin Gerster

Down the yellowcake road: the minefield of Australian uranium

Using a range of sources, from personal narrative to news reportage, government discourse and both pro and antinuclear polemic, this article examines the fraught business of uranium mining and export in contemporary Australia in the context of the nuclear history of this country since the Second World War. The first great boom in Australian uranium, during the 1950s, was attended by nationalistic triumphalism: an isolated country had been catapulted onto the Cold War map. But that initial burst of enthusiasm has given way to agonising over the ramifications of being a primary purveyor of the fundamental nuclear fuel to a volatile world. A succession of governments has struggled to resolve embedded inconsistency on the issue, and the bipartisan political enthusiasm for expanding the uranium industry clashes with the hostility of a public otherwise sympathetic to mining. Concerns about the global consequences of peddling a potentially lethal resource are exacerbated by the most vexing of all Australian domestic concerns—that of indigenous rights—for the “modern Midas mineral” is found primarily on Aboriginal land. The landscape of Australian uranium is a minefield of competing motives and interests and invokes two national narratives that seem irreconcilable.

Capturing Japan: Australian Photography of the Postwar Military Occupation

Official Australian photography of the military occupation of postwar Japan provides a significant modern case study of photography as a medium of neo-colonial and Orientalist representation. Asserting its dominance of the combined British Commonwealth Occupation Force supporting the Americans, the Australian military revelled in the role of occupier of a wartime enemy who was still widely loathed. Sometimes compared with the British Raj in Imperial India, the Occupation became a historically familiar exercise of the white man’s power and privilege over the conquered and colonised Asiatic. It was marked by the rituals and practices of tourism, including the taking of photographic images. Photography was the main medium by which the event was recorded and circulated to the public back in Australia. Keen to convey images of a force enjoying the privileges of victory while in firm control of a still distrusted people, official photographers affiliated with the Australian military sought to capture a picturesque, feminised and ‘traditional’ Japan. This was a Japan that the war had made obsolete and which the Occupation was intended to modernise. The photographic appropriation of Japan reveals the ambiguity of the Occupation project, and the shallowness of Orientalist representation more generally.

Take two: photography and the reconstruction of the post-war Australia/Japan relationship

Abstract Photography was a significant mediator of responses to Japan in the post-war period, from the late 1940s when thousands of Australians travelled to the country to participate in the US-led military occupation, through to the signing of the landmark Australia-Japan Commerce Agreement in 1957. The camera became a crucial instrument of reconciliation, as Australians began to look at the recent enemy with what one visitor called ‘non-military eyes’, reframing the ‘traditional’ Japan privileged by official military photographers into a dynamic, embryonically modern society with a future linked to Australia’s own. After the Occupation ended and Australia moved to cement the bilateral relationship with Japan, photography continued to act as a powerful medium of cultural reinterpretation.

War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War

Characterised by their determination to get close to the action, the Australian combat cameramen of the Second World War made a significant contribution to the evolution of the war photographer into the dynamic figure familiar today. This is especially true of their intimate documentation of the vicious encounter with the Japanese in New Guinea and other islands of the Southwest Pacific, which went beyond professional bravery. A large corps of official photographers shooting for both government and military agencies expressed the racial ideology of a war fought against an opponent who was increasingly loathed as the war progressed. Their pictures of Australian triumphs over the Japanese, including graphic and often deliberately demeaning pictures of dead and captured enemy, reflected the exigencies of wartime propaganda. But they also expanded on a frame of cultural reference derived from decades of anxiety about the threat of invasion by Japan, and reveal an abiding national view of the battlefield as the definitive arena for a contest of rival masculinities. Australia’s war in the Pacific has attracted increasing scholarly and popular attention in recent years. However, the enormous archive of official photographs has been largely ignored, except as a source of illustrative material. This article argues that the archive needs to be read as a collective text in its own right, for the significant insight it provides into Australian cultural as well as military and geopolitical insecurities.

Touring “Vietnam”: a cultural and political map of the Australian war

Abstract This chapter considers the cultural and political legacies of the Australian military tour of duty in Vietnam, primarily through the tropes of mapping and travel. It contends that Vietnam, the country, has been systematically erased in the attempt to locate the war in the Australian national narrative.

Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War through Australian Cinema

The cinema has transmitted the Anzac legend with extraordinary emotive power. Here is the first extended study of how the Great War Anzac legend has been portrayed in Australian film and television productions over 80 years.