Every country has its strange moments in history… the Americans have prohibition, the British have a king who abdicated the throne for love… and Australia? Well, it has the time we sent the military to fight emus… and lost.
No kidding, as ridiculous as that sounds, this actually happened.
In 1932, farmers in Western Australia were having a rough run. The Great Depression was in full swing, wheat prices were low, and many of the farms being worked had been allocated to returned soldiers after World War I. They weren’t hobby farmers looking after a few acres on weekends, their crops were serious, and their only source of income, and many were already struggling to make ends meet.
Then the emus arrived.
Not a few dozen birds wandering through a paddock, estimates put the number at around 20,000, yes twenty thousand. After breeding inland, huge flocks migrated towards the coast and discovered that Western Australia’s wheat growing regions were full of something they found particularly appealing…. fresh crops.
The birds moved through farming districts in large numbers, eating wheat, damaging fences and creating openings that allowed rabbits to move in behind them. For farmers already under financial pressure, watching months of work disappear wasn’t funny at all, it was devastating.
Eventually, enough complaints reached the government that a decision was made to intervene, and this is where the story takes a turn that nobody could have predicted.
The government sent soldiers armed with Lewis machine guns. On paper, the plan looked fairly straightforward… find the emus, shoot the emus, protect the crops. What nobody appreciated however, was that emus are surprisingly difficult targets.
When confronted, they didn’t stand around waiting to be shot. Large flocks would split into smaller groups and scatter in multiple directions. The birds could run at speeds approaching 50 km/h, often disappearing into scrub before soldiers could get a clear shot. One military observer even remarked that the emus seemed to have their own commanders, with a few birds acting almost like sentries while the rest escaped.
The more the soldiers tried, the worse it seemed to get. At one point they mounted a machine gun on the back of a truck and attempted to chase the birds across paddocks. Unfortunately, Western Australian farmland turned out to be far rougher than expected. The vehicle bounced so violently that accurate shooting became almost impossible, while the emus disappeared over the horizon probably wondering what on earth the humans were doing!
Newspapers across the country couldn’t believe what they were reading, the public couldn’t either! Australia, a nation that had fought in the First World War only a decade earlier, was suddenly making headlines because its military was struggling against large flightless birds…. and the truth was, the emus were winning, how embarrassing!
So How Much Damage Did The Emus Actually Cause?
That’s one of the frustrating parts of the story, nobody was standing in wheat paddocks in 1932 with spreadsheets and drones measuring crop losses. What we do know is that the damage was significant enough for farmers to repeatedly petition the government for help, and significant enough that the government actually responded.
The emus weren’t simply eating wheat heads. They were trampling crops as they moved through paddocks in large numbers and breaking fences as they went. Once those fences were damaged, rabbits could move in behind them and caused even more destruction.
For many of the affected farmers, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Australia was deep in the Great Depression and wheat prices were already under pressure. Losing part of a crop wasn’t an inconvenience, it could have meant the difference between staying afloat and falling further into debt at a time when many farmers were already hanging on by their fingernails.
While the military operation has become the famous part of the story, the real issue was that farmers were facing genuine financial hardship and were looking for a practical solution.
The Solution Turned Out To Be Much Less Exciting
After the headlines faded and the soldiers packed up, farmers still had a bird problem. What eventually proved effective wasn’t military force, but infrastructure… good ol fencing.
The government expanded sections of exclusion fencing and supported barrier programs designed to keep wildlife out of cropping areas. Unlike soldiers, fences didn’t need ammunition, didn’t get frustrated, and didn’t care how fast an emu could run. The concept was quite simple, stop the birds getting into the crop in the first place. Although it wasn’t a perfect solution, it worked far better than trying to chase thousands of wild animals across vast farming districts with a machine gun.
What Do Farmers Do Today?
Despite what the internet might suggest, Australia isn’t still at war with emus, although some farmers would probably argue otherwise during a bad season.
Today, emus remain protected native wildlife and are managed much differently. Farmers rely on a combination of exclusion fencing, property design, strategic placement of water sources and wildlife management programs to minimise damage.
Modern fencing technology has come a long way since the 1930s, and many farming operations are designed with local wildlife in mind. Farmers and wildlife have always shared the landscape, the focus now being agriculture and nature to coexist without one destroying the other, and most of the time that’s exactly what happens.
Did The Emus Actually Win?
Technically? Not really. The emu population wasn’t threatening to overthrow the government, seize Parliament House or establish an independent bird republic in Western Australia. But if we’re talking about the military operation itself? Then yes, the emus came out looking pretty good.
The objective was to significantly reduce the numbers damaging crops. That objective wasn’t achieved, the operation was scaled back, the birds remained, and alternative solutions were eventually adopted.
Why Has This Story Become Australian Folklore?
Because it contains all the ingredients us Aussies love… it’s slightly absurd, it’s self-deprecating, it’s set in the bush, it involves farmers trying to solve a very real problem, and it ends with a result nobody expected.
Most countries would probably prefer to forget a story like this, but Aussies love a good laugh at themselves, and this one ticks all the funnies!
Nearly a century later, people are still discovering the Great Emu War for the first time and wondering whether it’s real. Overseas media rediscovers it every few years. Social media loves it, history podcasts love it, school teachers love it. All because it feels almost too ridiculous to be true, yet it really did happen.
Underneath the jokes, though, the story says something interesting about Australian agriculture. Farming has never been easy, whether it’s droughts, floods, rabbits, locusts, market crashes or 20,000 hungry emus arriving at exactly the wrong time, Australian farmers have always had to adapt to challenges most people never see.
The emus may have stolen the headlines, but the farmers are the reason the story still exists. After all, while the birds moved on, the farmers stayed, rebuilt, and kept growing food.
As for the emus? They’ve spent the last 94 years enjoying a reputation as the only army in history that can claim victory over Australia without ever firing a shot.
Not bad for a bird that can’t even fly.
