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    "headline": "Great Emu War: Australia sent machine guns after 20,000 emus in 1932 and approved round two on 12 November",
    "description": "Australia's Great Emu War of 1932 sent soldiers with two Lewis guns after about 20,000 emus in Western Australia, and the birds largely outran them.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-12T19:30:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Emu, Emu War, George Pearce, Western Australia",
    "articleBody": "Two machine guns, 10,000 rounds of ammunition and three soldiers were sent to beat roughly 20,000 emus in the Western Australian wheatbelt in 1932. The birds won the first round. On 12 November 1932, Australia’s defence minister, Sir George Pearce, signed off on a second try anyway. The episode is remembered as the Great Emu War, and it remains one of the strangest jobs ever handed to a modern army. Why soldiers were sent after birds After World War I, Australia gave thousands of returning veterans plots of marginal farmland in Western Australia. When the Great Depression hit in 1929, those soldier-settlers were urged to grow more wheat, with promised subsidies that never arrived. Prices kept sliding. Then the emus came. After breeding, the big flightless birds move from the dry interior toward the coast, and the newly cleared fields and stock water around Chandler and Walgoolan suited them perfectly. They ate and trampled the crops and broke holes in fences that let rabbits pour in. A group of ex-soldiers took the problem to Pearce in person. They had seen what machine guns could do on the Western Front and asked for some. Pearce agreed, on conditions: army personnel would operate the weapons, the state would pay for transport, and the farmers would cover food, lodging and the ammunition bill. Round one: 2 to 8 November Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery took charge, with two Lewis guns and a crew of just two more men, a sergeant and a gunner. Rain delayed the start until 2 November, when about 50 emus were spotted near Campion. Settlers tried to drive them into range, but the flock broke into small groups and scattered. Two days later, Meredith set an ambush by a dam as more than 1,000 birds approached. The gunners held fire until the emus were close, but the gun jammed after only 12 birds fell. Mounting a gun on a truck did not help either; the truck could not keep up and the ride was too rough to aim. Army observers grew almost admiring. Each group, they wrote, “seems to have its own leader now—a big black-plumed bird which stands fully six feet [1.8 m] high and keeps watch.” By 8 November, 2,500 rounds had been fired for a body count that estimates put anywhere from 50 to 500. Parliament discussed the fiasco that day, and Pearce pulled the troops out. Round two, approved on 12 November The emus kept raiding farms in the heat and drought, and Western Australia’s premier, James Mitchell, backed the farmers’ plea for help. A base commander’s report claiming 300 birds killed in the first push gave Pearce cover, and by 12 November he approved a second deployment. Meredith was back in the field the next day. This time the tally climbed faster, to roughly 100 birds a week by early December. When Meredith was recalled on 10 December, he reported 986 confirmed kills from 9,860 rounds, plus 2,500 more birds he believed died of wounds, a figure historians treat with suspicion. He had kind words for his opponent: “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.” The emus’ victory, by the numbers Run the arithmetic on Meredith’s own report and the operation needed ten rounds of ammunition for every confirmed dead emu, against a population estimated at 20,000. Even taking his claims at face value, fewer than one in five of the birds in the district would have been hit. Farmers asked for the army again in 1934, 1943 and 1948 and were turned down each time. A bounty scheme proved far more effective: 57,034 bounties were claimed over just six months in 1934. Barrier fences did the rest. Badiyaa has covered other odd government fixes for animal problems, such as the day Oregon used half a ton of dynamite on a beached whale in Florence, and the emu’s African cousin, whose ostrich drinking technique involves a 9-foot head tilt. The emu itself is still Australia’s largest native bird and sits on the national coat of arms. The war ended on 10 December 1932, 38 days after it began. Further reading Wikipedia: Emu War Image: Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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