In November 1932, a small detachment of the Royal Australian Artillery arrived in the wheat belt of Western Australia with two Lewis machine guns and about 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They had been sent to fight emus.
The "Great Emu War" has since become a favorite internet joke, and the punchline is usually that the birds won. That is close enough to the truth. The fuller story, though, has more to say about farming, politics and the Great Depression than about the emus themselves.
Why there were soldiers in a wheat field
After the First World War, the Australian government encouraged former servicemen to take up farmland through soldier settlement schemes. Many of them were given land in marginal parts of Western Australia, where they grew wheat.
By the early 1930s, those farmers were struggling. The Depression had driven wheat prices down, and subsidies the government had promised never arrived. Then, after the breeding season, large numbers of emus moved inland toward the cultivated land, where they found water and crops.
Emus are large, fast, flightless birds. Adults can stand well over five feet tall, and their running speed is often given as up to about 50 kilometers per hour. A big flock in a wheat field eats a good deal of the crop and tramples even more of it. The birds also broke through rabbit-proof fences, which let rabbits into the farmland.
The farmers asked for help. Some of them were veterans who knew what machine guns could do, and they asked for military assistance. The Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce, agreed to provide it.
How it went
Major G. P. W. Meredith led the operation. It started in early November 1932 near Campion, in the district around Walgoolan and Chandler.
The plan was simple enough: find a flock, get close, and open fire. Problems turned up almost at once.
- The birds scattered. Under fire, the emus did not stay bunched together. They broke into small groups and ran off in different directions, which made machine-gun fire inefficient.
- The range was wrong. Lewis guns are designed for sustained fire at people at a distance. Against a fast, scattered target, a lot of rounds went wide.
- The guns jammed. On at least one occasion a gun jammed in the middle of an encounter with a large flock, and only a handful of birds were killed.
- Mounting a gun on a truck did not help. The soldiers tried shooting from a vehicle, but the ground was too rough for the gunner to aim, and the birds could outrun the truck.
The newspapers took up the story, mostly in a mocking tone. In Parliament, members raised questions about the cost and the results. After about a week, the soldiers were pulled out.
Round two
The farmers' troubles had not gone anywhere, and in mid-November the government let the operation start up again, once more under Meredith. This second phase lasted into December 1932 and was somewhat more effective.
Meredith's report claimed 986 emus killed with 9,860 rounds, or about ten rounds for each confirmed kill. He also stated that around 2,500 more birds later died of their wounds. Those figures come from the military's own reporting. They are the best numbers available, but nobody checked them independently, and the figure for wounded birds in particular is an estimate.
The operation wrapped up in December 1932 without solving the problem.
What came after
Farmers asked for military help again in later years, including in 1934, 1943 and 1948, and each request was refused. The government turned instead to a bounty system that paid people for every emu killed. Far more emus were killed under the bounties than during the military operation. Over time, better fencing became another key tool.
Today emus are protected in many parts of Australia under wildlife laws, although landholders can still obtain permits to manage them where they damage crops.
Why the jokes are only partly fair
It is tempting to write the whole thing off as a farce, and in some ways it was one. Sending machine guns after birds that run in every direction was a poor plan, and the newspapers of the day saw that plainly.
A few points do tend to get lost in the retelling, however:
- The farmers were in real distress. Many of them were veterans working poor land in a terrible economy, and crop losses hit them hard.
- It was small. Calling it a war overstates things considerably. It amounted to a handful of soldiers and two machine guns over about a month.
- The goal was political as well as practical. Some historians note that the government saw a chance for the operation to make it look supportive of struggling settlers, and perhaps to give the guns some live use.
- Other methods worked better. The bounty system and fencing are the real account of how Western Australia managed its emus. They just make for a less funny story.
How to read the famous quote
Many articles quote Meredith comparing emus to tanks, saying they could face machine guns "with the invulnerability of tanks," and that with an army of birds like that he could take on any army in the world. The quote comes from a later account by the ornithologist Dominic Serventy, who described the episode in the 1960s. It is widely repeated, but it is secondhand. It can fairly be repeated as reported, though it should not be presented as something written down in 1932.
That is a common pattern with history stories that spread online. A single vivid line gets repeated so often that it starts to seem more certain than it really is.
Why it is remembered
The Great Emu War lives on because it is absurd, and because it turns the expected story upside down. A modern army sets out to defeat an animal and fails.
The more useful lesson is a quieter one. When a problem has its roots in economics and land policy, a show of force often looks good in the newspaper and achieves little on the ground. What the farmers needed were fences, fair prices and the support they had been promised. Machine guns were never going to deliver any of that.
Sources
- Murray Johnson, "'Feathered foes': soldier settlers and Western Australia's 'Emu War' of 1932," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 88 (2006).
- National Archives of Australia, Department of Defence files on the 1932 emu operation.
- Dominic Serventy and Hubert Whittell, Birds of Western Australia (later editions), source of the often-quoted Meredith remark.
- Trove, National Library of Australia, newspaper coverage from November and December 1932.