AUSTRALIA’S GREAT EMU WAR

FOR INFORMATION

Summary

• In 1932, Australia fought - and lost - a war on its own territory, against emus. 

• An estimated 20,000 emus plagued new farmers settling land in Western Australia, destroying their crops to the point they asked for government assistance, which came in the form of a small artillery unit armed with 10,000 rounds of ammunition. 

• After only 38 days, fewer than 1000 emus had been killed, and the operation was abandoned. 

Background

1. In the wake of the First World War, the Australian government offered parcels of land in Western Australia to returning soldiers, hoping to provide them with a source of stable income, and develop the land in the arid outback region around Perth. The land was barely arable, which made it cheap to provide to the new farmers, but difficult for them to work. Their situation worsened with the onset of the Great Depression and the fall in wheat prices, so the Australian Government sought to increase their yield to compensate, with promises of subsidies. 

2. Wheat prices continued to fall and promised subsidies never transpired. By October 1932, the farmers were preparing to either harvest their crops, or to leave them rotting in the fields in protest. Then to make matters worse, emus began to arrive in droves. Migrating to the coast from inland regions, an estimated 20,000 of the tall, flightless birds descended on the area and caused havoc. The farmers’ efforts to clear the land had the unintended effect of providing the perfect environment for the emus - open spaces, crops for food, and water for livestock. In addition to eating and damaging crops, the emus also damaged fencing which then allowed other wildlife, particularly rabbits, to do further damage. 

3. A delegation of farmers, remembering the effectiveness of machine guns, approached the Australian Minister of Defence with a proposal - provide just a couple of these modern weapons and mow down the defenceless scourge. Agreement was reached on condition that the military would carry out the task, rather than simply provide the guns to the farmers, on the basis that it would provide good target practice, and that the government of Western Australia would pay for the ammunition and provide food and accommodation to the soldiers. It was also deemed to be a useful demonstration of the Australian Government’s value to the western state, which was seeing the early stages of a secessionist movement gaining significant support, and would see a referendum take place the following year. 

Issue

4. In October 1932, Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith of the 7th Heavy Artillery was put in command of the operation, with two soldiers each armed with a Lewis light machine gun and 10,000 rounds of ammunition between them. After a period of heavy rainfall caused the emus to spread over a larger area, the operation commenced in November.

5. The campaign began on 2 November against a modest showing of around 50 emus. Local settlers attempted to herd them into range of the guns, but the birds split into smaller groups and scattered, despite no formal training in strategy or evasive maneuvers. Initial bursts of gunfire were disappointingly inaccurate, with only a handful of birds killed. Two days later a more promising opportunity arose: the emus were advancing en masse towards a dam where the gunners were holding their fire until the perfect moment. When it came, the gun promptly jammed, with just 12 emu casualties. The rest of the flock dispersed equally promptly, mostly unbothered, and no more were sighted that day. With little success over the next few days, one of the guns was mounted on the back of a truck in an attempt to chase after fleeing emu, but this did not prove a useful innovation - the truck could not keep up with the speed of the birds over the rough terrain, and even if it could, the bouncing made it impossible to aim at anything. 

6. After only 6 days, a quarter of the ammunition had been fired with estimated success of only around 50 emus killed, although the farmers were optimistically estimating 200 to 500. Meredith later reported that, while he and his men had not suffered any physical injuries, they had suffered bruised dignity, and compared the conflict to British losses to the Zulus in the Battle of Rourke’s Drift, where a much less technologically and tactically advanced force out-manoeuvred what could be assumed to be a superior force. Local reports of the poor performance spread across the country, and on the 8th November, after the cull was discussed at the country’s House of Representatives, the military force was withdrawn. The Prime Minister was sardonically asked in Parliament if a medal would be struck for the soldiers involved. 

7. With the emus returning in greater numbers thanks to drought further inland, the farmers returned to their representatives to ask for support. With the support of the State Premier for further military intervention, and a revised report from the previous month’s activity which stated that 300 emus had been killed, it was agreed that guns would again be provided. With an apparent lack of experienced gunners in the area, Meredith and his soldiers returned to lead the attack. The first two days saw approximately 40 emus killed, and by 2nd December, the average kill rate was up to approximately 100 per week. With the available ammunition exhausted, Meredith’s unit was recalled, and reported 986 kills - a rate of around 10 rounds per confirmed kill. Meredith also claimed that 2,500 birds had died from injury, but this was without evidence and believed to be substantially inflated.

8. Problems with emus continued for the next decade, with requests for military assistance in 1934, 1943 and 1948, which were all turned down by the federal government. But other approaches had shown promise; more widespread use of exclusion barrier fencing, strong and tall enough to prevent incursion by the emus saw numbers decline, and a bounty system in place since 1923 continued with more than 57,000 bounties claimed in just a six month period in 1934. This was further supported in 1950, when in response to a rise in emu-related damage, the federal government released 500,000 rounds of ammunition from the army to be used by farmers.

9. The Emu War became an object of widespread ridicule both within Australia and internationally. The press mocked the operation almost immediately, seizing on the mismatch between the military’s firepower and its inability to defeat a bird, with headlines portraying the emus as cunning guerrilla fighters, fuelled by Major Meredith’s deadpan praise for the birds' tactical prowess. 

10. Ultimately, while the emus survived unscathed, the war damaged the credibility of the government’s approach to rural issues. It prompted a pivot to more conventional pest control methods — bounties, fences, and agricultural boards — rather than soldiers with machine guns. although the Emu War made the government look foolish, it wasn’t enough to seriously threaten its position. There were no ministerial resignations, no parliamentary crises, and no formal inquiry into the Emu War. But the Defence Department distanced itself from future pest control efforts, and the military quietly resolved never to lend its services to bird-hunting again. Policy responsibility shifted to civilian agricultural and environmental agencies, and pest management became a matter of bounties, local boards, and infrastructure, not bullets. It was helped by the fact that the government was relatively new, with Joseph Lyons only having been Prime Minister for 9 months, having taken over after the collapse of the previous government in the wake of the Great Depression. His broader platform, focused on budget balancing, economic recovery, and rejecting radical measures like proposals to default on foreign debts, still appealed to the public. Lyons' premiership would continue until his death in office in 1939. 

11. Critics of the government did question why military resources had been deployed at all, especially during the economic strains of the Great Depression. The government's decision to act, and then to so publicly fail, fed into broader criticism of Canberra’s detachment from rural hardship, particularly in Western Australia. Some historians suggest the government authorised the operation partly as a symbolic gesture to show it was “doing something” for struggling farmers, especially amid accusations of neglect. Despite this, or maybe in part because of the operation, the state voted to secede from Australia just six months later, nearly reaching a two-thirds supermajority, but enacting the decision faced severe constitutional difficulty thanks to Australia’s imperial relationship with the United Kingdom, and the process was eventually abandoned.

Debate

12. In the years that followed, the Emu War acquired a strange sort of mythic status. It became shorthand for bureaucratic overreach, misjudged military involvement, and the stubborn chaos of Australian nature. It is now regularly cited in Australian popular culture — from comedy sketches and pub trivia to school history lessons — as a real event that reads like satire. The story has been adapted into a musical and two action-comedy films, one of which is in development and written by Monty Python’s John Cleese.

13. Meredith was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 1934, and then to Colonel at the outbreak of World War 2 during which he served as Director for Mechanisation, then of Artillery at Army Headquarters, retiring in 1946. 

14. Today, the emu stands proudly alongside the kangaroo as one of the supporters of Australia’s coat of arms, with an estimated 650,000 remaining across the country. Thankfully, they are no longer such a menace to farming, though no thanks to three army blokes with a couple of machine guns.