The Great Emu War: When Australia Declared War on Birds — and Lost

In 1932, the Australian military deployed soldiers armed with machine guns against 20,000 emus devastating wheat crops in Western Australia. The emus won. This is not a joke.

ScrollFacts  ·  Weird History  ·  Australia  ·  8–10 min read

There are moments in history that sound so absurd you assume someone made them up. The Great Emu War of 1932 is one of those moments — except it is completely, verifiably, documented-by-the-Australian-government real. The Royal Australian Artillery was deployed, with Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, to wage war on a flock of birds. The birds won. Comfortably.

What makes the story remarkable is not just the outcome. It is the context — the perfect storm of economic desperation, government miscalculation, and sheer biological stubbornness that produced one of history's most unlikely military campaigns. And it is the emus themselves, which turned out to be, against all reasonable expectation, formidable adversaries.

01 — The Desperate Background

To understand why Australia ended up declaring war on birds, you need to understand the people who asked it to. The Campion district of Western Australia in the early 1930s was populated largely by veterans of the First World War — men who had survived Gallipoli and the Western Front and had been rewarded by the Australian government with parcels of land on which to build new lives as farmers.

The land was marginal at best. The soil was poor, the rainfall unreliable, and the conditions nothing like what the government's optimistic brochures had suggested. Many of the veteran farmers had no prior agricultural experience. By 1932, a quarter of them had already abandoned their land entirely.

Those who remained were surviving — barely — by growing wheat. Then the Great Depression arrived, wheat prices collapsed, and a government subsidy that had been promised never materialised. The farmers were broke, isolated, and already at the edge of what they could endure. The last thing any of them needed was 20,000 emus.

02 — Twenty Thousand Emus Arrive

Emus are the second-largest birds on Earth — standing up to two metres tall, capable of running at nearly 50 kilometres per hour, and descended, like all ratites, from the same ancient lineage as dinosaurs. They are highly nomadic, migrating seasonally after breeding, and they are opportunistic feeders — meaning they go wherever food and water are available.

In 1932, a severe drought across inland Australia pushed an unusually large migration of approximately 20,000 emus directly into the Campion wheat district. The cultivated land, with its crops and additional water supplies laid on for livestock, was ideal emu habitat. They moved in with no concept of the economic catastrophe their arrival represented.

The emus consumed and trampled the wheat crops. They broke through fences designed to keep out rabbits — and once the fences were breached, the rabbits poured in and caused additional damage. For farmers already teetering on collapse, it was an existential crisis. They wrote to the government. They pleaded for help. And the government, in its wisdom, decided to send the army.

03 — The Plan: Send in the Military

The farmers' appeal reached Sir George Pearce, Australia's Minister of Defence. Pearce was a former soldier himself and had a reasonable relationship with the veterans now farming in Campion. Their logic was straightforward: machine guns had stopped charging soldiers in the First World War. Surely machine guns could stop charging birds.

Pearce agreed. He authorised a military operation to cull the emu population, framing it as both pest control and a public service to struggling veterans. Three members of the Royal Australian Artillery were assigned to the mission: Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith in command, Sergeant S. McMurray, and Gunner J. O'Halloran. They were equipped with two Lewis light machine guns — the same weapons used to devastating effect on the Western Front — and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

A cinematographer was brought along. The military fully expected this to be a clean, swift, photogenic operation that would make for good newsreel footage. They were wrong on every possible count.

"The original plan called for the soldiers to collect 100 emu skins so that their feathers could be used to make hats for Australian light horsemen. By the end of the campaign, nobody was asking about the hats."

04 — Day One: Immediate and Comprehensive Disaster

The operation was supposed to begin in October 1932, but heavy rain across the region scattered the emus over a wider area, forcing a delay. By the time the soldiers arrived in Campion on 2 November 1932, the emus had partially dispersed — which meant the opening engagement involved approximately 50 birds rather than the expected thousands.

Even 50 birds proved unmanageable. The settlers attempted to herd the emus toward the machine guns using trucks. The birds simply split into small groups and ran in different directions, making them almost impossible to target. The guns were fired. A number of birds were killed. The rest scattered and were gone.

On 4 November, Major Meredith arranged a more ambitious ambush near a local dam where emus regularly gathered to drink. Over a thousand birds were spotted moving toward the position. The soldiers waited until the emus were at close range and opened fire — only for one of the machine guns to jam after just a few rounds. The emus scattered instantly. By the time the gun was cleared, there was nothing left to shoot at.

After three full days of military operations, approximately 30 emus had been confirmed killed. The soldiers had used hundreds of rounds. The remaining 19,970 emus were entirely unimpressed.

05 — The Emus Fight Back — With Tactics

What made the campaign particularly humiliating was the growing realisation that the emus were not behaving like passive targets. They were adapting.

Observers noted that emu groups consistently posted what appeared to be lookouts or scouts on higher ground — individual birds that monitored the movements of soldiers and, on detecting a threat, gave a signal that caused the entire mob to scatter before the guns could be brought to bear. Whether this constituted genuine tactical awareness or simply the natural vigilance of a prey animal, the effect was the same: the emus were consistently one step ahead.

Soldiers attempted to pursue the emus using trucks across the rough terrain of the Campion district. This was also a failure. Emus can sustain speeds of nearly 50 kilometres per hour, and on the uneven ground of the Western Australian outback, the trucks simply could not keep pace. One vehicle crashed after hitting an emu at speed. The machine guns, designed to be fired from fixed positions, were extremely difficult to aim accurately from a moving vehicle.

And then there was the problem of emu durability. Their dense, shaggy plumage and tough hides meant that a glancing bullet from even a Lewis gun rarely produced an immediate kill. Many emus absorbed multiple rounds, continued running, and died later from their injuries at a distance — making it difficult to assess the damage caused by any given engagement, and ensuring that the confirmed kill count remained frustratingly low.

"Major Meredith was later reported to have observed: 'If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. They could face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.'"

06 — Parliament Laughs; the Press Has a Field Day

By 8 November 1932 — less than a week into the operation — news of the military's difficulties had spread nationally. The Australian press, which had initially covered the deployment with straight-faced seriousness, pivoted rapidly to mockery. Headlines announced the failure of the Emu War. Cartoonists had a gift that kept giving for weeks.

The story also reached the Australian House of Representatives, where it generated something rarely seen in parliament: genuine laughter. Members debated the campaign with barely concealed amusement, and one representative suggested that if medals were to be awarded for the conflict, they should go to the emus, who had "won every round so far."

Major Meredith withdrew his team on 8 November, citing the ineffectiveness of the operation and the waste of ammunition. The farmers, still facing 20,000 intact emus, were furious. They demanded the soldiers return. Under pressure from the agricultural lobby and the veterans' community, the Minister of Defence authorised a second deployment on 12 November.

07 — Round Two: The Military Returns

The second phase of the operation, beginning 13 November, went marginally better. With experience gained from the first disastrous week, the soldiers were more selective about their engagements, choosing terrain that favoured the guns and waiting for emus to consolidate before opening fire. In the first two days of the resumed campaign, approximately 40 emus were killed — a marked improvement over the first phase.

By early December, the operation had found a rhythm of sorts, with approximately 100 emu kills per week being reported. It was still nowhere near the scale required to make a meaningful dent in a population of 20,000 birds — and it was being achieved at a rate, according to Meredith's own final report, of exactly ten rounds of ammunition per confirmed kill.

The operation was officially ended on 10 December 1932. Meredith submitted his final report claiming 986 confirmed kills, with an estimated 2,500 additional birds dying later from their wounds. Out of roughly 20,000 emus, the Australian military had, across 45 days of active operations, eliminated approximately 5%. The remaining 95% continued eating wheat.

08 — The Aftermath and What Actually Worked

In the years following the Great Emu War, the Australian government tried several further approaches to the emu problem. A bounty scheme was introduced, paying farmers for each emu killed — this proved considerably more effective than machine guns, with approximately 57,000 bounties collected in the first six months alone. Armed farmers on their own land, with rifles and local knowledge, turned out to be far more efficient predators than three artillerymen with machine guns on unfamiliar terrain.

The real long-term solution, however, turned out to be the one that did not involve killing anything. Fencing. Subsidised government fencing programmes allowed farmers to properly secure their land against emu migration, and the metre-high barbed-wire barriers that gradually enclosed the wheat districts proved far more effective than any military campaign. The State Barrier Fence — originally built to exclude rabbits — was extended and reinforced to include emus.

Further requests for military assistance in subsequent emu invasions were declined. The government had learned its lesson. The ornithologist D.L. Serventy, writing about the episode, described it as "an attempt at the mass destruction of the birds" that had achieved little beyond embarrassing the military and entertaining the press.

Sir George Pearce, the Minister of Defence who had authorised the campaign, was subsequently nicknamed "Minister for the Emu War" by his parliamentary colleagues. He did not enjoy the nickname.

What the Emu War Actually Teaches Us

The Great Emu War is funny. It is supposed to be funny. It reads like a Monty Python sketch that somehow got funded by the Australian government and documented on official military record. But underneath the comedy is a story about real desperation — soldiers-turned-farmers who had survived a world war and were now watching their livelihoods be eaten by birds, in the middle of a global economic depression, by a government that had already broken its promises to them once.

It is also a story about the limits of force as a solution to ecological problems. The emus were not invaders. They were native animals doing what native animals do — following food, following water, following the instincts that had kept their species alive for millions of years. The farmland was new. The emus were old. Dropping machine guns into that equation was never going to resolve anything, and the soldiers on the ground knew it almost immediately.

And it is a story about the limits of institutional thinking. The farmers asked for machine guns because machine guns were what they knew. The minister approved machine guns because he was a military man. Nobody in the chain of decision-making stopped to ask whether machine guns were actually suited to the problem at hand. The answer — fencing — was obvious in retrospect, and had been available all along.

The emus never cared about any of it. They ate the wheat, they broke the fences, they outran the soldiers, and they went about their business. They are still in Western Australia now. There are a lot of them. They look exactly as unbothered as you would expect.