In November 1932, a major of the Royal Australian Artillery stood in a wheat field in Western Australia, commanding two Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and a mission unlike any in military history. His enemy: emus. Roughly twenty thousand of them. Within a month, Major G. P. W. Meredith would be in reluctant awe of his opponent, comparing the giant flightless birds to tanks, and the Australian press would be gleefully reporting that the army had lost a war to poultry.
The absurdity had serious roots. After the First World War, the Australian government had settled thousands of veterans on marginal farmland in Western Australia's wheat belt, around districts like Campion. By 1932 these soldier-settlers were being crushed from two directions: the Great Depression had collapsed wheat prices, and promised government subsidies hadn't materialised. Then came the third blow. Emus — Australia's largest native bird, standing up to about six feet tall — migrate from inland regions toward the coast after their breeding season, and that year some twenty thousand of them discovered that the newly cleared, freshly watered farmland was a superb habitat. They trampled crops, devoured wheat, and smashed holes in fences through which rabbits poured in to finish the job.
The farmers, many of them ex-soldiers who knew what machine guns could do, petitioned for military help. The Minister of Defence, Sir George Pearce, agreed to send Major Meredith with two soldiers, the Lewis guns and the ammunition — with the farmers providing food, lodging and payment for the ammunition used. A cinematographer came along too; someone clearly expected good footage.
The birds fight back
The campaign opened on 2 November 1932 near Campion, and things went wrong immediately. The first group of about fifty emus stayed out of range; when locals tried to herd them toward the guns, the birds split into small groups and sprinted in all directions. A machine gun is a weapon designed for massed targets, and the emus flatly refused to mass. Days later, Meredith set an ambush near a dam where a thousand or more birds were heading. The gunners waited until the emus were at point-blank range — and the Lewis gun jammed after only a handful of birds fell. The rest scattered.
Meredith then tried mounting a gun on a truck to chase the birds down. This failed comically: the ride over rough ground was so violent that the gunner couldn't fire a shot, and the emus could outrun the truck anyway — emus can sprint at around 50 kilometres per hour. Observers noted that the birds seemed to have evolved tactics: each mob appeared to have a lookout that warned the rest. Meredith himself, in a much-quoted remark, said that if Australia had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it could face any army in the world — they could take machine-gun fire and keep running like dismounted tanks.
By 8 November, after roughly 2,500 rounds had been fired for a few hundred birds at most, the operation had become a national joke, was raised in the House of Representatives, and was called off. When one member asked whether a medal would be struck for the campaign, another retorted that any medals should go to the emus, who had 'won every round so far.' It was around this time that Sir George Pearce acquired the mocking nickname 'Minister of the Emu War.'
Rematch and surrender
The farmers, still besieged, begged for the guns back, and the operation resumed on 13 November. The second phase went somewhat better, settling into a grind of roughly a hundred emus killed per week. When Meredith was recalled in December, he reported 986 confirmed kills for 9,860 rounds fired — a suspiciously tidy ratio of exactly ten bullets per bird — and claimed another 2,500 birds had later died of wounds. Even taking his figures at face value, the overwhelming majority of the emu horde had survived two military expeditions. Requests for further military assistance in later years were refused.
What finally worked was decidedly unmilitary. The government reverted to a bounty system that paid locals per emu beak, which proved far more efficient — in one six-month period in 1934, tens of thousands of bounties were claimed. In the longer run, exclusion fencing did the real work of keeping emus out of the wheat belt. The ornithologist Dominic Serventy delivered the campaign's epitaph, writing that the machine-gunners' dreams of point-blank fire into massed emus were soon dissipated, for the emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics.
The Great Emu War endures as history's most quotable military defeat: a modern army, armed with the signature weapon of the Western Front, fought two campaigns against birds and failed to move the needle. The emu, for its part, marches on — it appears alongside the kangaroo on Australia's coat of arms, a national symbol that once outmanoeuvred the nation's own artillery.
Quiz nuggets
- The Great Emu War took place in November–December 1932 in Western Australia's wheat belt, against a migration of roughly 20,000 emus.
- The army deployed Major G. P. W. Meredith with two Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds; Meredith reported 986 emus killed for 9,860 rounds fired.
- Defence Minister Sir George Pearce was mockingly dubbed the 'Minister of the Emu War,' and a parliamentarian quipped that any medals should go to the emus.
- Emus can sprint at around 50 km/h and scattered into small groups, defeating weapons designed for massed targets.
- The eventual solutions were bounty payments and exclusion fencing, not the military — and the emu still appears on Australia's coat of arms.