Fart Claims Authority Over Wind (a brief history of bondi beach)

The term ‘bondi cigar’ evokes an image of a man dripping gold and fake tan, driving an elite sports car turned into a 4wd not fit for purpose, puffing on imported hand rolled Cuban tobacco with sugar coated nose hairs.

In truth, the expression refers to turds floating in the surf… not metaphoric ones.

On the headland at north bondi is a sewage plant, as a child, I remember it pumping raw sewage out into the ocean, something would regularly go wrong and cigars a plenty.

How we manage our waste is actually the perfect analogy for our society.
Since Sydney’s inception, its first fresh water, ‘the tank stream’ was not only named with impeccable utility but was transformed from sacred, into poisoned filth with the efficiency the name implies. The tank stream still flows, beneath the main street in the cbd.

Shit rolls down hill, it’s the number one rule of plumbing, 25mm fall in a metre
and then pump it from a holding tank to somewhere no one is looking, at least no one who matters.

Since the bondi cigar days, property prices in the area have turned what was once a rough and wild surf side suburb into an exclusive internationally renowned destination, insulated against the stink of its own shit by the watertight barrier of wealth.
So the sewage pipes where made longer, extended out in increments of kilometres. Now when the shit blows back in, it ends up in Cronulla.

This waste management scheme has been in place from the earliest days, the lion of the British empire had a human waste issue, the problem of the poor, the criminal class, the peasants, the irish, the catholics, the less fortunate…
America afforded ample opportunity for pumping refuse, until the war of independence.
And so, the main political purpose behind the creation of the Australian colony was waste management.
A jail, the palatable justification for the piping of excess humans, to a holding tank.

The second fleet where private slavers ships, people paid to deliver a cargo, paid on the number of people who where placed on the ship at point of origin… not how many where unloaded at the destination.

I think it best to tell this story through the use of imagery from my childhood story book about a vegetarian lion who loved bunnies.

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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.