Some stories are too strange to stay in a drawer. This one has feathers.
In the spring of 1932, the Australian army went to war against a flock of birds. It brought two machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition and a major of the Royal Australian Artillery. A little over a month later, it went home. The birds stayed. This is the true story behind Plate XIV of the Femage archive, The emus won.
Why were soldiers farming wheat in the first place?
After the First World War, Australia gave returning soldiers land to farm, much of it on the dry edges of the wheat belt in Western Australia. When the Great Depression came in 1929, the government urged them to grow more wheat, while the promised support never quite arrived and prices fell.
Then, after their breeding season, the emus came. Around twenty thousand of them moved inland toward the cleared land and the water, and found the wheat. They ate the crops, trampled what they did not eat, and broke through fences, which let rabbits in behind them.
Who declared war on the emus?
The farmers were ex-soldiers, and they knew what machine guns could do. A delegation asked the Minister of Defence, Sir George Pearce, for help. He agreed, on terms: soldiers would operate the guns, the state of Western Australia would pay for transport, and the farmers would supply food, lodging and the ammunition.
The force was small. Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, a sergeant and a gunner, two Lewis guns and ten thousand rounds. They arrived near Campion, between Perth and Kalgoorlie, and the first shots were fired on 2 November 1932.
What happened when the guns opened fire?
The emus did not behave like an enemy on a map. They split into small groups and scattered. They ran fast, far and in every direction at once. On the first day about fifty were sighted, and perhaps a dozen were hit. Two days later more than a thousand emus came toward an ambush at a dam. The gunners waited until the birds were close, the gun jammed after twelve, and the rest of the flock was gone.
There is a detail from the time that we love more than we should. One account describes each group of emus as having its own leader, a big black-plumed bird about six feet tall, who kept watch while the others ate and warned them when the soldiers came. The soldiers saw tactics. We see staff.
After about a week and some 2,500 rounds, the newspapers were laughing and the matter reached Parliament. The soldiers were withdrawn on 8 November. Meredith reported that his men had suffered no casualties, except for their dignity.
Did the army try again?
It did. The farmers were still losing their wheat, and the soldiers returned on 13 November. This second campaign lasted until 10 December 1932. By Meredith's own count, 9,860 rounds were fired and 986 emus killed, almost exactly ten rounds a bird. He also claimed that many more died later of their wounds, a figure historians treat as generous.
Whatever the true count, the result was plain. The flock was not destroyed, the wheat was not saved by guns, and the army did not come back, though the farmers asked again more than once in the years that followed.
What did Major Meredith say about the emus?
The line that made the whole affair famous is his:
"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world."
So who won the Emu War?
History has mostly given it to the emus, and so have we. What finally worked was dull and paper-based: a bounty system that paid farmers for each bird, with tens of thousands claimed over the following decades. No machine guns, no headlines, no Parliament. Just forms.
That is exactly the kind of ending the archive exists for. Power arrives with its equipment and its plans. The underdog runs in several directions at once. The paperwork gets the last word.
The story is printed on a sepia card that comes with every shirt, like a page torn from a 1932 newspaper, with space for its number written by hand.
If the Emu War makes you smile, the shirt is here: Plate XIV, The emus won. Each plate is made in a numbered edition of 100, and you can reserve your number on the page. The other editions are in the Editions.
Sources: the account of the 1932 operation in Western Australia as retold by Australian Geographic, and the historical record summarized in the Wikipedia article "Emu War". Figures are Major Meredith's own reports, which historians consider optimistic.
