Formerly a professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Gerster has written extensively on the cultural histories of war and travel, and on Western representations of Japan.
The PhD thesis that emerged from this research was later published as Big-noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing,[2][3] which remains the landmark study in its field.
[5] In the 1990s he held the Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo – an experience which led to the "provocative" travel book, Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan (1999).
[6] His book, Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan, won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History in 2009, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Non-Fiction Book Award and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History.
Published in 2020, Hiroshima and Here: Reflections on Australian Atomic Culture is a cultural history of Nuclear Age Australia, focusing on the reverberating impact of the atomic bombings of August 1945, and the complexity of Australian responses to the fact and possibility of nuclear destruction.