Samuel · forgotten history
Western Australia, 1932. Three soldiers, two Lewis guns, ten thousand rounds, and a bird that refused to fall down.
The emu is the second-largest bird alive. It stands nearly two metres tall, it cannot fly, and it runs at about fifty kilometres an hour. Australia would eventually put it on the national coat of arms, holding up the country alongside the kangaroo. Before that, the country declared war on it.
After the First World War, the Australian government settled thousands of returned soldiers on farmland in the west, in the wheat belt around Campion and Walgoolan. Then the Great Depression collapsed the price of wheat, and in 1932 a drought pushed roughly twenty thousand emus in from the interior, looking for water.
They walked through the crops and ate the wheat. They trampled what they didn't eat, and they tore holes in the fences. Through those holes came rabbits, which finished whatever the emus had left standing. The farmers were almost all ex-soldiers, and when they went to the government for help, what they asked for was machine guns.
Sir George Pearce, the Minister for Defence, agreed. On 2 November 1932, the Royal Australian Artillery sent three men into the wheat belt: Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith, a sergeant named McMurray, and a gunner named O'Halloran. They brought two Lewis light machine guns and ten thousand rounds of ammunition.
Sit with the ratio for a moment. Three soldiers. Two machine guns. Ten thousand bullets. Twenty thousand birds.
The emus would not stand still. They broke into small, fast groups and ran on flat ground where a machine gun's fixed field of fire is close to useless — a weapon built to cut down a line is not built for a target that scatters at fifty kilometres an hour. Their hides turned glancing bullets. At least one army truck crashed while chasing a single bird.
After the first few days, the tally was a few dozen emus out of twenty thousand. Major Meredith filed a report that reads less like a military dispatch than a grudging compliment to his enemy:
If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.
The press loved it. The campaign picked up the name the Emu War, and in Parliament a member observed that the emus had won every round so far. On 8 November, six days in, Pearce withdrew the soldiers and the guns.
Then the farmers asked for them back. The army returned on 12 November and stayed on and off until Meredith was recalled on 10 December. The second phase was more methodical, with the guns mounted on a truck and the killing running at roughly a hundred birds a week.
Meredith's final report claimed 986 confirmed kills using 9,860 rounds — ten bullets for every emu. He estimated that another 2,500 birds had probably died of their wounds later. Historians still argue over the numbers, but the number that mattered was smaller than it looked: against a population of twenty thousand, the army had barely dented the flock.
The army was never sent after emus again. The things that did work were unglamorous: ammunition handed to the farmers, a bounty paid per bird, and stronger fencing. Between 1945 and 1960, Western Australia paid out on 284,704 emus as pests. The emu is now a protected species, and it stands on the Australian coat of arms, holding up the nation that once tried to shell it.
The reason the story lasts isn't that the soldiers were fools. It's that the army was built for a kind of enemy that doesn't exist in a wheat field: something that lines up and holds its ground. The emus had no strategy at all. They simply refused to behave the way the weapon assumed they would. Against a machine gun, that turned out to be enough.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Emu War" (britannica.com). Wikipedia, "Emu War" (en.wikipedia.org). History Hit, "The Great Emu War" (historyhit.com). National Geographic, "Australia's Emu War" (nationalgeographic.com). Retrospect Journal, "The Great Emu War" (retrospectjournal.com). Trove, National Library of Australia newspaper archive, including "'EMU WAR' DEFENDED," 19 November 1932. Details cross-checked against these.
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