Join Professor Robin Gerster as he presents a lecture on his 2024 National Library Fellowship research into the life of historian Harold S. Williams and Williams' historical research in Japan. Professor Robin Gerster is a 2024 National Library of Australia Fellow in Japan Studies, supported by the Harold S. Williams Trust. 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. 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. 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).