In November 1932, the harsh southern sun beat down on an empty paddock in Western Australia. The soil is red and strewn with rocks. Three soldiers emerge from the haze: An officer and two gunners, their backs straight, their uniforms immaculate. Then, their leader holds up a hand and bids his charges halt. He’s seen the cloud of dust on the horizon; a cloud that can mean only one thing.
The officer barks orders. The gunners salute and then dig themselves in as best they can, readying their machine guns against the onslaught to come. These three brave men have come to fight for the future of Australian agriculture, to face down a foe the Australian army has never faced before. Screw your courage to its sticking place, dear reader, for they have come to battle… the emu.
The legacy of a real war: World War I
Yes, it’s true. As an Australian, I can confirm that my country once fought a war against an army of large, somewhat comical flightless birds. And here is our secret shame: we lost.
The story sounds absurd, because it is absurd. But it starts with the bitter legacy of a real war: World War I, in which nearly half a million Australian soldiers—38.7% of the male population aged 18 to 44—fought. After the Armistice, the return of thousands of wounded, traumatized veterans presented the Australian government with an uncomfortable question: What was to be done with them?
The answer was a program of “soldier settlement”, whereby veterans were given plots of land—much of it in areas where the soil was marginal at best—and encouraged to make a living as farmers, a profession of which relatively few had any experience or knowledge. Many of these soldiers ended up in Western Australia, where they grew wheat, a crop that in the mid-1920s was “was just about worth its weight in gold.”
Unfortunately, things didn’t stay that way. As the 1920s came to an end, the effects of the Great Depression combined with an oversupply of wheat to send prices tumbling. To make things worse, the Australian federal government promised to subsidise the soldiers’ crops—and then reneged on that promise when it couldn’t get the requisite bill through parliament.
The arrival of the emu hordes
Into the middle of this already parlous situation marched an unexpected force of feathery foes: emus. Thousands of them.
In Western Australia, emus’ migratory patterns take them back and forth between the state’s relatively fertile coastal regions and its dry, barren interior. As they followed this route in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they found that all of a sudden, there was a whole lot of farmland in their way.
This was of no great concern to the birds—indeed, if anything, it was a positive development, meaning an ample supply of both food and water. The emus helped themselves happily to both, smashing down fences and churning up crops in the process.
For the farmers, however, this felt like the final insult. They were broke and hungry, the promised subsidies had not arrived, and now a bunch of huge flightless birds were trashing what little remained of their crops. They demanded that the federal government take action. The government responded by sending in the army.
Not the entire army, mind you. No, the force dispatched to Western Australia to take the fight to a horde of recalcitrant birds consisted of exactly three soldiers, along with two Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of .303-caliber ammunition.
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The First Emu War
And so, we return to 1932 and our three protagonists, preparing for their first encounter with the massed might of the emu swarm.
It did not go well.
If you’ve never seen an emu, your first impression is likely to be that they appear somewhat ridiculous. But here’s the thing: They’re a whole lot less amusing up close than they are from afar.
Emus are the second largest bird species in the world, after the ostrich, to which they are related. Adults can grow to be over six feet tall and weigh in at well over 100 pounds. They can’t fly, but they can run, and run fast: their top speed is around 30 mph.
Their powerful legs end in serious claws, which they can—and do—use to kick anything they find threatening. While they’re not as aggressive as ostriches or vicious as cassowaries (a flightless bird that roams New Guinea’s tropical forests), they’re still perfectly capable of inflicting serious damage on an adult human.
With all that in mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that three men were unable to make much of an impression on a thousands-strong herd of hungry emus. Their cause wasn’t helped by their equipment, either. One gun jammed during an initial skirmish, and an attempt to mount it on a Jeep was undermined by the roads being so terrible that firing the thing in a straight line proved impossible.
The Second Emu War
After a week of frustration, the three-man army beat a hasty retreat. On their return east, the commanding officer—a man blessed with the spectacular name of Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith—spoke in impressively racist terms of the foes that he and his men had faced. “[Emus] can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks,” he said. “They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.”
Still, like any good soldier, Meredith wasn’t going to be discouraged by a bunch of invulnerable avian tanks. A week later, he and his men were wading back into the fray.
After a month of pitched battles, he claimed that they had killed 986 birds, with 2,500 more likely to die from their injuries. The first figure raised eyebrows because the trio used 9,860 rounds of ammunition, for exactly 10 cartridges per kill, and the second was essentially speculation. In a 2006 paper in the Journal of Australian Studies, historian Murray Johnson poured scorn upon Meredith’s report:
“There could be no accurate way of even knowing how many birds had been wounded.” But whatever the exact level of the losses, they appeared to make precisely no difference to the emus. In his paper, Johnson argued that if anything, the whole fiasco made things worse: “It is highly probable that the machine-gunners actually exacerbated the crop losses, for every time the guns were able to open fire the birds scattered widely, trampling the maturing wheat as they desperately sought cover.”
The aftermath of the battle
Even at the time, the Emu War attracted ridicule. There was a strong suspicion that the deployment of Meredith and his two valiant soldiers was more of a low-cost publicity stunt than a serious attempt to cull the emu population.
The decision to send a cinematographer along with the soldiers did nothing to allay this, and the resultant footage certainly has more of an air of farce than it does of “serious attempt to rescue the livelihoods of impoverished farmers”. (The fact that the accompanying music sounds strikingly like the Monty Python theme doesn’t help matters.)
Western Australia Makes War On Emus
Even in 1932, many thought the Australian army’s war on the giant birds was ridiculous. Video: Western Australia Makes War On Emus / British Movietone
Today, the affair seems like a mildly embarrassing historical footnote, but its legacy lives on in the solution that the Western Australian government eventually found to its emu problem. After decades of unsuccessful culling attempts and bounty payments, the state finally shelled out £52,000 (somewhere between $1.4m and $1.95m in today’s U.S. dollars, depending on the calculation you use) to build 135 miles of fencing around the state’s wheat-growing areas.
The fence has been extended several times since, and today it runs for nearly 850 miles, stretching across much of the state. It has proven effective at restricting emus’ movements, but has also done untold damage to other native species’ habitats and migration patterns. In a country finally moving toward a less adversarial approach to its land, the fence is increasingly controversial; the remnant of an era when Australia would rather go to war with its wildlife than try to live alongside it.
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