Dark Emu War

The Great Emu War, was a military operation in 1932 in Campion an abandoned town in the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The area today is better know for rolling droughts, desertification, endangered species and climate-change devastation.

Following World War 1, large numbers of veterans were given land by the Australian Government to take up farming in Western Australia.
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, these farmers were encouraged to increase their wheat crops, with the government promising (and failing to deliver) assistance in the form of subsidies.

As many as 20,000 emus found that the cultivated lands were good habitat, in particular the marginal farming land afforded to veterans.

Farmers all too familiar with war, requested machine guns, soldiers armed with Lewis guns where deployed.
Although suffering a minor number of fatalities, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction, relatively unscathed.
“Mobility scandalised Europeans. Their road obliged them to fence and guard, to stay put, to make hard work a virtue. This gave great advantages, including the numbers and technology to explain why a white Australian writes this book. It also led them to condemn people who reduced their material wants, sat yarning in daylight, and gave so much time to ceremony and ritual. These were preserves and pursuits of gentry. It did not seem right that Aborigines should be like that.”
― Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth

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Growing up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, Coates often felt a sense of estrangement caused by the inauthenticity of his surroundings. This has become a central theme in his artwork as he sees this cognitive dissonance reflected in the broader social fabric of Australia.

After dropping out of high school, Robert was accepted into art school solely on the merits of his portfolio. But his restless nature and dislike of institutions let him to leave before graduating, setting him on a journey through a plethora of places and communities on the rugged edges of society.

His myriad careers, from being a chef in inner city Sydney, to working as a builder in Western Australia, deep underground in the mines of the Tanami desert or abseiling waterfront high-rises has taken him across the Australian continent several times. Mirroring his working life, Robert’s art has a muscular physicality and urgency surrounding his creations.

His themes deal with his feelings about Australia, it’s history, the immense beauty of it and the sadness that resonates through the land and it’s people. In his work he explores the relationship we have to our surroundings, specifically in relation to his own country, but also more broadly interrogating the interconnectedness of everything with a raw, unforgiving spontaneity.

Robert has exhibited work in Sydney, Perth and Darwin
Most recently in the 2019 Mosman art prize, and in the 2019 Korean-Australian Art Prize.