Great Emu War: How Australia started a war against flightless birds – and lost

On December 10, 1932, the Great Depression led Australia to declare war on one of its beloved flightless birds – the Emu. It proved to be one of the most futile military upsets of all time. The Great Emu War of Western Australia as it came to be known, was a bizarre expedition where the country lost in a full-scale war against birds. There’s a sentence that is both absurd yet unsurprising.

The genesis of the 1932 war can be traced back nearly two decades before that in 1915 when the Australian government launched a soldier settlement program to help World War I veterans find gainful employment as they couldn’t afford to pay them pensions in the heights of the Great Depression. The policy entailed compensating over 5,000 soldiers huge swaths of farmland for cultivating wheat and rearing sheep. The scheme saw soldiers settling in western Australia in one of the most remote and inhospitable lands – also known as Emu country.

Farmlands or Emu country?

Emus began to devastate the newly acquired farms in 1922, just 7 years after the lands were allocated to veterans. Unable to cope with the menace, the government quickly reclassified them from “protected species” to “vermin”. Meticulous documentation on the issue revealed that by 1932, over 20,000 emus were confirmed to be stomping over farm lands and eating crops grown by the soldiers. 

Around the same time, the Great Depression caused the price of agricultural produces to collapse, making farmers’ lives even harder. Lacking enough ammunition to kill the emus, the farmers were threatening to abandon the lands and demanding the government to find more prospective lands and relocate them there.  It was in 1932, on November 2, that the Australian army intervened after immense pressure from farmers unions and other activists. 

Great Emu War of 1932

In the first-ever battle of the Great Emu War, soldiers reportedly armed with 10,000 rounds of ammunition and Lewis machine guns set out from Perth to launch an open attack, which failed. The devastating failure was widely covered by the Australian media at the time and the reason given for it was – the birds were too quick and tough to kill. Newspapers constantly printed new war strategies devised by experts who all recounted later that it would take more than a couple of bullets to bring them down. And it was also revealed subsequently that nearly all of the Emus escaped the attack. 

Before the end of November, the Australian military was launching full-blown war day after day against Emus. Soldiers responded to reports every day of more birds flocking there with a “strategy” of their own to counter the attack. Soldiers got closer and shot the birds from all directions, the casualties were still only a few dozens. The army even shifted to guerrilla warfare, but to no avail. With every new strategy, the emus adapted to the battle. 

The army also acknowledged that “each pack seems to have its leader now – a big black plumed bird which stands fully six feet high and keeps watch while his mates carry out their work of destruction and warns them of our approach,” Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery said, in an interview to an Australian media.  

“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 Major leading the offensive was quoted saying about the incident.

Video credits: AP

After 38 days of intense battle, with guns jamming, vehicles breaking down and only a few hundred Emus killed, the army was asked to call off the Great Emu War on December 10, 1932. The Australian government opted instead to provide the farmers with ammunition free of cost, as and when they needed it and also promised to build a 200km anti-emu wall, which never fully materialised. They also incentivised the farmers by placing bounties on Emus. 

The farmers continued killing Emus and collecting their bounties for many years later. According to the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, the law on hunting Emus is very clear. Although their status has been changed to “protected species” they can be culled if they enter private properties and with appropriate gun licenses. And now nearly 90 years later, Veteran soldiers turned-farmers may have had the laugh but there’s no denying that Emus still won the great war against a fully packed Australian army nearly despite all odds stacked against them.

Inputs from AP, Australian Geographic