Major Gwyndd Meredith marched into Western Australia with two Lewis machine guns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and the kind of confidence only government planning can produce.
His mission sounded simple enough: help struggling wheat farmers deal with thousands of emus tearing through crops and fences. The birds, rudely, had not been briefed on the chain of command.
The trouble began after World War I, when returning Australian veterans took up farming under soldier-settlement programs. By the early 1930s, drought and falling wheat prices had already squeezed them hard.
Then came the emus. They moved through the wheat fields, ate crops, wrecked fences, and left openings for rabbits to follow. Farmers who had survived war, debt, heat, and bad policy found themselves staring down a feathered invasion with long legs and no respect for property rights.
Sir George Pearce, Australia's minister for defense, approved military help after soldier settlers asked for machine guns. The conditions sounded practical on paper. The state would cover costs, military personnel would handle the weapons, and the farmers would supply food, lodging, and ammunition payments.
A clean little operation, everyone could tell himself, until the first burst of gunfire met the ancient tactical genius of birds running in every direction at once. From History Hit:
Settlers in the region conveyed their concerns to the Australian government. Given that many settlers were military veterans, they were aware of the capacity of machine guns for sustained fire, and that is what they requested. Minister of Defence, Sir George Pearce, agreed. He ordered the army to cull the emu population.
The ‘Emu War’ proper began in November 1932. Deployed to the combat zone, such as it was, were two soldiers, Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran, and their commander, Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery. They were equipped with two Lewis light machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Their objective was the mass extermination of a native species.
Already forced to push their campaign from October due to rain scattering the emu across a wider area, the military struggled at first to make effective use of their firepower. On 2 November, locals tried to herd emus towards an ambush, but they split into small groups. On 4 November, an ambush on some 1,000 birds was foiled by a gun jamming.
Over the next few days, the soldiers travelled to locations where emus had been spotted and attempted to complete their objective. To this end, Major Meredith mounted one of the guns on a truck to enable firing at the birds while moving. It was as ineffective as their ambushes. The truck was too slow, and the ride was so rough that the gunner couldn’t fire anyway.
By Nov. 5, 1932, the campaign already had the feel of a field report written by a man trying not to laugh. Meredith and Sergeant McMurray spent the night in a paddock, opened fire at daybreak, killed a dozen birds, wounded several more, and then prepared another ambush in a crop where larger flocks were expected. The gunners had fired 2,000 rounds by then, with roughly 200 victims estimated.
For a war against birds, the kill-to-bullet ratio wasn't exactly something to carve into a memorial.
The emus kept doing what emus do best: they scattered, regrouped, ran, watched, and avoided behaving like polite targets. Reports soon turned comic. One later account described an observer claiming each pack seemed to have a lookout, a tall black-plumed bird keeping watch while the others worked.
Major Meredith later admired their staying power, saying a military division with the birds' bullet-carrying capacity could face any army in the world.
Pearce defended the operation in the Senate on Nov. 18, saying people unfamiliar with emu country couldn't grasp the damage the birds caused. Drought had driven them into settled areas by the thousands; their fence damage opened the door to rabbits, and reports of only a few dead birds had led him to halt the operation, but later figures put the toll in the hundreds, and military help resumed after renewed pleas from farmers.
The whole thing ended the way such projects often do: with the problem still standing, the professionals embarrassed, and the locals left to cope. National records now put the final count at fewer than 1,000 emus killed before the cull was abandoned. From History Hit:
On 8 November, an embarrassed Sir George Pearce withdrew the troops from the front line. Yet the emu nuisance had not stopped. On 13 November, Meredith returned following requests by farmers and reports that more birds had been killed than had earlier been suggested. Over the next month, the soldiers slayed around 100 emus every week.
When asked if there was a “more humane, if less spectacular” method to undertake the cull, Sir George Pearce replied that only those familiar to emu country could understand the damage done, according to the Melbourne Argus of 19 November 1932.
But it was at a huge cost in ammunition, which Meredith claimed was exactly 10 rounds per confirmed kill. The operation may have saved some wheat, but the effectiveness of the cull paled next to the strategy of offering bounties to rifle-wielding farmers.
By contrast, farmers managed to claim 57,034 bounties over six months in 1934.
The campaign was beleaguered by errors and was hardly a success. And worse, as The Sunday Herald reported in 1953, “the incongruity of the whole thing even had the effect, for once, of arousing public sympathy for the emu.”
Farmers asked for military help again in 1934, 1943, and 1948. The Commonwealth government refused each time, perhaps having learned that machine guns were poor farm tools and emus were poor treaty partners.
The Great Emu War survives because it sounds invented by a barroom historian with too much time and not enough supervision. Beneath the comedy, though, sits a harder little truth. The farmers had real losses, the birds weren't villains, and the government reached for spectacle when patient, practical measures would've done more.
Australia didn't lose a war in the grand sense; it lost a lesson in humility, and the emus carried the field without issuing a single statement.
