The Army that Lost a War to Flightless Birds: Australia 1932

In 1932, in Western Australia, soldiers with machine guns were sent against twenty thousand emus. The emus won. Here is how an army lost to a flock of birds, and why the people who asked for it were not joking at all.

Start with the farmers. After the First World War, Australia offered returning soldiers a plot of land to start a new life. In Western Australia, much of that land sat in the dry wheatbelt, hours inland from Perth, and a lot of it was poor. The government urged these settlers to grow wheat, and promised subsidies to carry them through. Then, in 1929, the Great Depression began. The price of wheat kept falling. The promised money never kept pace. By 1932 these veterans were in debt, on hard land, and about to harvest a crop that might not cover its own cost. Some were threatening to hold back their wheat deliveries in protest. They had survived a war. Now their farms were failing quietly, and nobody was listening.

Emus are the second tallest bird on Earth, after the ostrich. They cannot fly, but they walk far and fast. After the breeding season, they travel from the inland towards the coast, and in 1932 about twenty thousand reached the wheat district around a town called Campion, roughly halfway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. Sources differ on why this year was different. Some point to dry conditions inland; others to the new cleared fields and water supplies that suited them. The result was simple. The birds ate the wheat, trampled what they did not eat, and pushed holes through the fences. Through those holes came rabbits, which ate what was left. For a farmer with one crop and no money, this was not funny. It was the end of the year.

A delegation of ex-soldiers went to the Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce. They asked for machine guns. The idea was not as strange as it sounds: these men had used machine guns in the war, and they knew what a gun could do against a crowd. Pearce agreed, with conditions. The army would run the guns. The Western Australian government would pay to move the troops. The farmers would feed and house them, and pay for the ammunition. Some historians have argued there was a political side too: a federal government wanting to look helpful to angry farmers at a time when Western Australia was talking about leaving the country. The man in charge was Major Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery. He was given two soldiers, two Lewis guns, which are light machine guns, and ten thousand rounds. The mission was planned like a military campaign. The enemy had not been told.

Rain delayed the start. The operation began on the second of November 1932. On the first day, about fifty emus appeared, but too far away to shoot. The next time the men found a group in range, around a dozen birds were killed, and the rest scattered. On the fourth of November, the soldiers set an ambush near a dam. More than a thousand emus walked toward it. The gun jammed after about a dozen birds fell, and the flock split into small groups and disappeared into the bush. Major Meredith tried again with a gun mounted on a truck. The truck could not keep up with the birds on rough ground, and the gunner could not aim while it bounced. By the eighth of November, about two thousand five hundred rounds had been fired. Reports of the result ranged from as few as fifty birds to several hundred, depending on who was counting. The soldiers had not been hurt, "except for their dignity", in Meredith's own words. That day, after press stories about a failure, the minister pulled the troops out.

Meredith wrote a report, and it is the most honest part of the story. He said the emus split into small groups whenever they were shot at, so a machine gun never found the dense target it needed. He compared them to tanks, saying they could face machine guns with "the invulnerability of tanks". He even said that an army with their ability to carry bullets and keep going would beat any in the world. An ornithologist, Dominic Serventy, was less impressed with the plan. The gunners had hoped to fire into a packed mass of birds. That hope, he wrote, was soon gone. The birds had simply done what a flock of prey animals does: spread out and run. This is the point many tellers leave out. The birds were not clever. They were hard to hit, and the plan assumed they would stand in a line.

Western Australia's premier, the leader of the state government, backed the farmers, and the Defence Minister agreed to try again. The guns went back to the district in mid-November. In the first two days, about forty emus were killed. After that the numbers fell, but by early December the guns were taking roughly a hundred a week. When Meredith was called back on the tenth of December, he reported nine hundred and eighty-six birds killed, from nine thousand eight hundred and sixty rounds, about ten rounds per bird. He also claimed that two thousand five hundred more had died later of their wounds. Historians doubt that last figure. One calls it highly disputed and likely to be very inflated. Nobody could check, because wounded birds ran off into the bush and were never counted. Parliament had its fun. A Labor member asked whether a medal would be struck for the soldiers. A senator called the minister the "Minister of the Emu War". Pearce, asked whether machine guns were cruel, replied that they were no crueller than rifles. The jokes stuck. The wheat problem did not go away.

What worked was boring. A bounty, a payment for every bird handed in, paid hunters, and in 1934 alone more than fifty-seven thousand bounties were claimed in six months. Farmers also built emu-proof fences, which became the standard fix. The army was asked back in 1934, 1943 and 1948, and refused each time. In 1950, farmers were given half a million rounds of rifle ammunition to do it themselves. And the emus? Today, three-quarters of a million of them live across Australia. Their numbers are stable. So here is the joke, and here is the part that is not. Yes, the army fired thousands of rounds and came home with its pride dented. But a government had given hard land to men who had already fought for it, then watched the wheat price collapse, and answered with a machine gun. The birds were never the real problem. They were the one problem the army could point at. The army fired thousands of rounds. The farmers needed a fair price for their wheat. In the end, a fence did more than a gun.