Australian Folly: The Great Emu War of 1932

A Weird Palate Cleanser Setup

Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Paul. So today I've got a weird one for you. A good weird. I want to say up front, because if you've been with this show for a while, you know we usually go pretty heavy. We take things pretty seriously, and we end up somewhere in the neighborhood of a war crime by the 10 or 15 minute mark. But today it is not that. Definitely not that. Today I get to tell you about a time a national government looked at a bird problem and decided that the correct response was machine guns.

I'm not exaggerating. That's the episode, and that's really what happened. This is going to be a standalone, so if this is your first time here, welcome. It picked a great week to show up, and this is not remotely representative of what we normally do. So stick around anyway. And if you've been listening since the heavier stuff, then consider this your palate cleanser. You've earned this. We just talked about five episodes of Israel and Palestine, and that was pretty hardcore. So here you go. So here's the setup.

And I promise I'm not making any of this up. It is 1932. We are in Western Australia, and there's tens of thousands of emus. Emus the bird. And they start tearing through wheat farms that are already barely surviving the depression. The farmers, who a lot of them are World War One veterans, guys who've already given their government about as much as a person can give, well, they ask for help. And the government's answer is to send the entire army with machine guns against birds. And the birds, and I need you to sit for this.

The birds win. Not win in some cute, feel-good underdog way. I mean the official military campaign ends, the soldiers go home, and the emus are still out there, completely unbothered, eating the wheat. It does become one of the most quietly embarrassing chapters in the history of a national military, and Australia's response eventually is just to make it a joke. Which honestly, I think is the healthiest possible response, and we'll get into why at the end.

Ratings, Reviews, And Listener Email

Before we get into the episode, two quick things. If you're enjoying this deep dives, rating or reviews will be extremely helpful. They help other people find the show. And if you've got 30 seconds, I would really appreciate that review. It is the most helpful thing and is extremely encouraging to me personally. And if there is a country, a war, we are footnote in history that you want us to dig into, an origin story of a nation, or honestly, if you just want to argue with me about something that I got wrong, please email us at double helixhistory podcast at gmail.com.

Alright. Emus, machine guns. Let's go.

First Shots At Campion

It is the 2nd of November, 1932. We are in the tiny wheat belt settlement of Campion in Western Australia. A place so small it barely qualifies as a town. Or a collection of tin-roof homesteads scattered across land that used to be scrub and is now in theory. A farmland. Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery. Flying in the dirt and a Lewis machine gun. He's a soldier who knows exactly what he's doing. He served on the Western Front. He has commanded men through artillery barrages, through mud and gas to machine gun fire, through the wars that industrialized warfare had to offer a human body.

Nothing in his training has prepared him for this.

About 50 emus are approaching across the open ground. Six feet tall at full stretch, built like feather battering ramps, moving with that strange rolling gait that makes them look less like birds and more like something assembled from spare parts. Sergeant S. McMurray is behind the gun. Gunner Jay O'Holloran is feeding the belt. They're both local farmers. Men who have watched these birds trample their fences and stripped their wheat to stubble for months. They are watching from a distance, waiting for the moment their government finally does something about it.

Suddenly, their gun opens up. And then it jams. Twelve birds are down. The rest of the flock has already scattered. But not in panic exactly. But in something that looks uncomfortably. Like tactics. They split into small groups and run in different directions. And by the time the gun is working again, there's nothing left to shoot at but open paddock.

Major Meredith stands up, rushes the dearth of his uniform, and stares out at the empty field. He has fought and lost the opening engagement of a war that Australia's government approved with machine guns, and that international newspapers will one day cover with a straight face, and that history will remember accurately as the day the Australian military went to war against Emus and did not win.

This is the Australian Folly, the Great Emu War of 1932.

Why This Absurd Story Matters

You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes? Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history. Not just to highlight Rio or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA. Those defining moments that shaped everything that came after. Those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives.

I'm your host, Paul, and this is Double Helix, Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries to their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that make countries who they are today.

This show usually spends his time in rooms where stakes are enormous. Revolutions, genocides, the moments that decide whether nations live or die. But today, we're spending an episode on a machine gun campaign against large flightless birds in Western Australia. And I promise you, we are not lowering our standards. We're just doing something different. We're asking what happens when a country's institutions, its military, its parliament, its press, collide with a problem so absurd that competence itself becomes a joke.

Because here's the thing about the Emu War of 1932. It isn't just a funny story, though it is extremely funny. It is a small, contained experiment on what happens when a modern industrial state points its most serious tools, soldiers, machine guns, government appropriations, at a problem that simply refuses to be solved by force. And the way Australia responded to that failure, not by covering it up, but eventually by laughing about it, by turning it into a founding joke about its own government, tells you something real about how this country came to understand itself.

A nation that spent its early 20th century proving itself in the meat grinders of Gallipoli and the Western Front also, within the same generation, lost a shooting war to birds. Both of those things are part of the same national memory. And today, we find out how.

Veterans, Wheat, And The Depression

Australia, like Britain and like Canada, ran a soldier settlement scheme. Veterans who survived the trenches were offered blocks of land, mostly in marginal, half-clear country on the edges of the wheat belt, and told that with hard work, they could build a farm and a future. It was meant to be gratitude, made tangible. You gave your body to the war, we'll give you a piece of the country. In practice, a lot of that land was poor. Promised infrastructure and subsidies were slow to arrive or never came.

And by the time the Great Depression hit in 1929, plenty of these ex-soldiers' farmers were already stretched to the edge. Then, Canberra, capital of Australia, trying to prop up struggling growers, encouraged them to expand wheat production anyway, dangling subsidies that once again failed to fully materialize. Men who had already given the estate one form of service were now being asked to gamble what little they had left for more of the same crop, on the same uncertain promises. And then the emus showed up.

Every year after breeding season, tens of thousands of emus moved from Australia's arid interior towards the coast, following water and food. In the spring of 1932, they found something better than anything the interior had to offer. A clear, cultivated wheat country with dams and irrigation put in specifically for livestock. An estimated 20,000 emus moved into the wheat belt around Chandler and Walgoolen and started doing what large, hungry, six-foot-tall birds do to an unfenced wheat field. They didn't just eat the crops.

They flattened it. They trampled it. And their sheer weight and habit of pushing through fences tore gaps that let rabbits pour in behind them to finish the job. For the farmers, most of them veterans, most of them already won bad season from ruin, this wasn't just an inconvenience. This was existential. And they did what people in functional democracies are supposed to do when they're desperate. They organise and then they asked their government to help. Specifically, they asked for machine guns.

That request for machine guns went to Sir George Pierce, Australia's Minister of Defence, a man who had, by this point, essentially been the permanent fixture of Australian defence policy since before the First World War. And Pierce said yes, for reasons that had almost nothing to do with actual EMAs. He agreed to send the Army's Lewis guns, partly because it would cost the Commonwealth government nothing. The state government would cover the ammunition and rail transport. And partly, historians have suggested, because Western Australia at the time had a real and active secessionist movement.

Farmers among its loudest voices, and a grateful population that had just watched their government solve the problem for them was a population less likely to vote to leave the Federation. It was foreign policy and political strategy wearing the same uniform. So, on the 2nd of November 1932, Major Meredith and his two Lewis guns arrived at Campion, and the war began.

Tactics Fail And The Press Pounces

What happened over the next six weeks, depending on how charitable you want to be, either a comedy of errors or a genuinely instructive case study in the limits of applying industrial military force to a problem that doesn't behave like an army. The first engagement, on November 2nd, we've already heard it. Fifty birds, a jam, and a scattering. Two days later, on November 4th, Meredith tried something smarter: an ambush. The scouts had located a dam more than a thousand emus were using as a watering.

So the gunners set up a concealment and waited for the birds to bunch up at close range. Where a machine gun would finally have the kind of target it was designed for. The strategy worked, but only for about 12 birds. And then, again, the gun jammed. And the flug didn't do what a herd of frightened farm animals is supposed to do, which is to bolt in a single panic mass that you can keep shooting at. No, they actually broke apart. Small groups peeled off in different directions, each one apparently following its own lead bird, and within moments, it was no longer a flux to fire into.

There were dozens of tiny, fast-moving, hard-to-hit targets scattered across open country. Army observers watching this on the ground started describing it in language you don't expect from a formal report. One noted that each pack seemed to have its own leader, a big black-plumed bird standing a full six feet tall, who would stay and watch while the others fed and warned them the moment the soldiers got close. Meredith tried mounting a Lewis gun on the back of a truck, hoping mobility would solve the problem that the ambush couldn't.

But it didn't. Emus can run close to 50 kilometers an hour. The wheat bill's rough, stump-pocked ground threw the truck around too violently for anyone to aim, and at one point, in a detail that's almost too on the nose to be real, an emu reportedly ran straight through a fence and dragged part of it under the truck's wheels, nearly rolling the vehicle. The birds, in other words, weren't just avoiding the technology, they were actually better suited to this terrain than the technology was. By November 8th, six days in, the soldiers had fired around 2,500 rounds, the kill count depending entirely on who you asked.

Military estimates ran as low as 50 birds. Farmers on the ground claimed the real number was somewhere between 200 and 500. Either way, the ratio of bullets to dead birds was catastrophic for anyone, hoping that this would look like a clean military success. And the press, which had been covering the quote unquote war with the kind of gleeful attention you'd expect, started reporting that almost nothing had been achieved. Pierce, watching the story turn from a demonstration of government competence into a national punchline, pulled the soldiers out.

And that should have been the end of it. But it was not. The farmers, still watching their week disappear, kept pushing. And on November 12th, the peers authorized a second deployment. This one running from November 13th through December 10th. And this time, Meredith adjusted his tactics. Fewer set piece ambushes, more small team operations that could actually keep pace with how the emus were now moving.

By the numbers Meredith reported at the end of it, the second phase killed 986 birds outright, using almost exactly 10 rounds per confirmed kill, plus, he claimed, as many as 2,500 more that were wounded and died later, out of sight from injuries. Contemporary historians treat that second figure with real skepticism, though. It's the kind of number that's awfully convenient for a commander trying to justify a campaign that had already become an embarrassment. What's harder to dispute is the ornithologist Dominic Serventi's summary of what actually went wrong, written not long after.

It reads The machine gunner's dream of point-blank fire into serried masses of emus were soon dissipated. The emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made the use of military equipment uneconomic. Which is, I think, one of the great sentences in the history of Australian government reporting. A trained ornithologist writing about the EMU command ordering guerrilla tactics with a completely straight face, because it was genuinely the most accurate way to describe what had happened.

Meredith himself, once it was over, gave the assessment that would follow this story for the rest of his existence. As to compare the campaign to actual combat, he said the emos can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. That if he had a military division with the bullet carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. And reaching for the most loaded comparison, a British Empire officer of 1932 had available, that they were like Sulus, whom even dum dumb bullets could not stop.

That is a quote that tells you two things at once. How genuinely professionally rattled a combat pattern was by losing a tactical engagement to birds, and exactly what colonial era vocabulary had reached for to explain it.

Once soldiers with machine guns are involved, a democracy tends to ask questions about it in public, and Australia's did.

Senate Questions And Public Backlash

On the 18th of November of 1932, while the second phase of the campaign was still underway, the matter came up in the Senate. Senator Guthrie asked the Minister of Defense, quite reasonably whether machine guns were really necessary to deal with emus, or whether some more humane method might do the job. Pierce's answer is worth hearing at length because it is the sound of a government official trying to make the absurd sound procedural. Rifles, he explained, had already been tried and failed. Only one or two birds could be shot before the remainder scatter far and wide.

Fences were useless against them. Ordinary fences, such as keep out dingoes and kangaroos, offer no obstacles to emus, for the birds take them in their stride, knock them down. And as for the animals themselves in the field, the birds actually roll down the crops. They act in a crop much as barnyard fowls act on a fowl yard. Which is, if you sit with it, a genuinely vivid image of a 20,000-strong wave of enormous flightless birds feeding a farmer's entire wheat crop the way chicken treats a bag of feed.

On the question of cruelty, Pierce noted that the RSPCA had actually sent an officer along to monitor the operation, and that in his view, there is no more cruelty in shooting birds with a machine gun than with a rifle. A defense that concedes, without quite meaning to, that shooting the birds at all was the part actually in question, and that the machine gun was really just a matter of degrees. As you may have guessed, none of this fully worked. By December, word had crossed the world, and British conservationists were riding in to protest what they called the threatened extermination of the rare emu.

Which is its own small joke, since emus were never rare, and they have never been in danger, and remain to this date one of the most numerous large birds on the planet. Australia's government was being publicly scolded for trying to wipe out a species that mostly did not care less about a couple of machine guns and was in absolutely no danger of disappearing.

Fences, Bounties, And A National Joke

Here's where the story becomes less about 1932 and more about what the country does with an embarrassment over time.

Farmers asked for military help again in nineteen thirty-four.

And every single time the government said no. The lesson of nineteen thirty-two had apparently landed strongly.

It wasn't forced at all. The bounties set up in nineteen twenty-three and continued through the following decades.

Over fifty-seven thousand bounties were clear. So did something even less dramatic.

The state didn't beat the emus. It just stopped trying to beat them and built a better fence instead.

But it's the story more than the fencing that had longer life. Almost as soon as it happened, the emu war became a joke. First, a local one. Farmers and journalists trading lines about the day the army lost to the birds. And then a national one, retold in newspapers and later in schoolrooms, and eventually, in the age of the internet, a genuinely global one. It is a kind of fact that travels well precisely because it's true and verifiable and still sounds made up. A real war declared with real machine guns against a real, non-metaphorical enemy that the government of Australia did not clearly win.

There have been comedy films made about it. There have been, at various points, more serious film projects attached to comedy heavyweights, trying to tell the story for the screen. And it shows up reliably on lists of the strangest wars in history, usually near the top. And I think that durability tells you something about the national character this show keeps circling back to. Australia's early 20th century was built in large part on stories of hardened competence in the fire. Gallipoli, the Western Front, the soldier settler turning wasteland into weed through sheer bloody-minded persistence.

The Emo War doesn't fit that story. And Australia kept it that way. Didn't get buried the way an embarrassing defeat usually does. It got folded to the national sense of humor, self-deprecating, skeptical of official competence, quick to admit when the government has made a fool of itself, and quicker still to make sure everyone remembers it. A country that can tell you, unprompted and with real affection, about the time that it lost a war to birds, it's a country that has made peace with the idea that its institutions are run by fallible people, not infallible ones, and that finding the funny is safer and maybe healthier than pretending it never happened.

The Emus, for their part, never signed anything. Just kept living in the wheat belt, mostly ignoring the fences entirely and unaware that they've become a national punchline and, in their own way, stay undefeated.

Next Time And Closing Thanks

Next time on Double Helix, we'll meet a 22-year-old Virginia militia officer whose encounter with a French scouting party in the disputed Ohio country sets off a chain of events you could never have predicted. It's 1754, and that one small skirmish spirals into a war fought simultaneously across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and India, arguably the world's first true war, will trace how it drags in nearly every major power on Earth, redraws the map across four continents, and ends with a peace that leaves Britain triumphant, broke, and making decisions about its American colonies, it will come to regret.

Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon.