The Great Emu War: How Australia's Army Lost to a Horde of Flightless Birds

It is perhaps the most-memed war in human history. In 1932, the Australian Army was dispatched east of Perth to take on an invading force of almost overwhelming strength. On the edges of the Outback, the farming community of Walgoolan was living in fear of 20,000 marauding intruders — intruders who were destroying their farms, wrecking their crops, and causing havoc.

But these were no ordinary, human enemies. The invaders at Walgoolan were emus: giant, flightless birds native to Australia. What followed would go down as one of the most humiliating defeats in military history. Outnumbered and outclassed, the Australians lost every major engagement against the birds, leading to a national scandal as comical as it was mortifying.

Yet there is more to the Great Emu War than just boneheaded blundering. Coming at the height of the Great Depression, the short conflict became a way for the nation to distract itself from its misery — an escape valve for very real feelings of despair, but only at the cost of ignoring all-too-real human suffering.

Key Takeaways

In late 1932, the Australian government deployed a tiny detachment of just three men armed with Lewis machine guns to combat roughly 20,000 emus devastating wheat crops around Walgoolan in Western Australia.
After a week of failed herding attempts, jammed guns, and scattered birds, only around 200 emus had been killed using a quarter of the available ammunition — about 1% of the mob.
The conflict’s roots lay in the failed Soldier Settlement Scheme, which placed inexperienced and often disabled Great War veterans on tiny, marginal blocks of farmland, then compounded the disaster by cancelling their wheat subsidies during the Great Depression.
The campaign became a national embarrassment: the press dubbed Defence Minister Sir George Pearce “Minister for the Emu War,” and MPs suggested any commemorative medals should go to the emus.
Only in the 1950s did a 217-kilometre emu-proof fence finally protect the Wheatbelt; by 1999 the emu had been reclassified from “vermin” to a protected species.

An infamous military blunder, a pop-culture legend, and a strangely poignant tragicomedy, this is the tale of the Great Emu War, and the all-too-human failures that lay beneath Australia’s legendary humiliation.

The Road to Repatriation

For a war so often regarded as the silliest ever fought, the Great Emu War has remarkably depressing origins. In fact, it begins with one of the most depressing conflicts of all time: World War One. As a Dominion of the British Empire, Australia automatically went to war alongside the United Kingdom in 1914. Unlike in some other British territories, there were no qualms Down Under about taking on Germany, and as the conflict broke out during an election campaign, both major parties competed to show support for London.

That early enthusiasm would soon curdle into something far more sour. No other conflict in Australian history comes even close to being as deadly as the First World War. From a population of under five million, Australia would lose 61,635 men, with an additional 156,000 wounded — often in the most horrific ways imaginable. The 1915 Gallipoli Campaign alone saw over 13% of all Australian deaths in a seven-month stretch of hell that remains as defining today as the Somme does for Britain, or Pearl Harbor for America.

Yet, despite the carnage on the battlefields of Europe, it was not the Germans or Ottomans who treated Australia’s soldiers with the most disdain — it was their own government. In the war’s early days, those returning from Europe were given no aid and no benefits. Repatriated veterans were instead dumped on small charitable organisations and basically told to deal with it themselves.

The Soldier Settlement Scheme

It was only once the horrors of Gallipoli leaked back home that public opinion began to change. The government realised it needed to support its heroes or risk being thrown out of office, and from those worries the Soldier Settlement Scheme was born in 1916.

The idea echoed the old saying about teaching a man to fish rather than simply handing him one. The scheme would take vast tracts of countryside and split them into blocks that returned soldiers would own and work as small-time farmers — with the added bonus that demobilised soldiers would generate new agricultural capacity for the nation, too. For the elite in Melbourne, it was a win-win: they appeared to be helping veterans while gaining farmland.

The public loved the idea as well. Since the 19th century, the figure of the Yeoman had loomed large in the Australian psyche — a rugged bloke who worked the land and lived as stoically and independently as his counterparts on the American frontier. Starting in 1917, some 90,000 square kilometres were set aside, from Queensland to Kangaroo Island, eventually split into over 23,000 farms handed to returning soldiers. Nor was eligibility limited to Australians; Canadians, New Zealanders, Britons — anyone who had fought alongside the Aussies could head Down Under, grab a plot, and start digging.

A Disaster in the Making

While the scheme sounded great on paper, the reality would be very different. Most blocks were barely four hectares — about ten acres — far too small for anything more than subsistence living. On top of that, most of the men who claimed the plots had zero farming experience, and many were left so disabled by combat that they could not work even if they wanted to. In short, it was a disaster in the making: a one-way road to poverty for almost all who took part.

Not that this stopped people from applying. Over 5,000 veterans were settled in Western Australia alone, with thousands more scattered across the nation’s states and territories. But it was those in Western Australia — where wheat was the primary crop — who would soon find themselves caught in the middle of another great war. Only this one would not be fought in trenches, or even against humans. Instead, it would bring them face to face with an enemy that could not be beaten: emus.

Bird Is the Word

So who exactly were the villains of this coming conflict — or, depending on your perspective, the heroes? The second-largest living bird, emus are a flightless species native to Australia, and one of the strangest animals on a continent stuffed with weird creatures. On the one hand, they can appear as terrifying as crocodiles. Standing 1.5 metres tall and weighing over 45 kilograms, emus are capable of running at over 50 kilometres per hour, and come equipped with powerful legs and razor-sharp talons.

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On the other hand, emus in a good mood come across as the ideal animal sidekick: playful, bizarre-looking, yet docile. Endlessly fascinated by human behaviour, they are perhaps the only animal in Australia that does not want to eat you, preferring instead a diet of plants and insects.

Perhaps because of these opposing sides, Australia’s response to them over the years has been contradictory, to say the least. Prior to colonisation, Aboriginal peoples included emus in many of their creation myths, with some considering them creator spirits. They did not, of course, call them “emus” — emu is likely a Portuguese corruption of an Arabic term for any generically large bird, one of the many imports that Europeans brought with them.

From Fascination to Vermin

One of the Europeans’ earliest encounters with an emu came in 1788, when one was taken as a specimen in what is now a suburb of Sydney. Initially, the giant birds were considered fascinating. Before long, though, they had become known as something else: prey. As more Europeans arrived and started clearing space for agriculture, it became clearer and clearer that emus were an almighty nuisance.

Emus love wide-open places with plenty of water — which is basically what farmland is. They also have a habit of not just eating crops, but trampling them, swiftly doing to entire fields what Genghis Khan used to do to whole continents. Since Australia’s colonisers liked their crops, that meant only one option: emu extermination. Over the next few decades, emus were shot, poisoned, and driven to extinction in one area after another.

By 1822, they had vanished from King Island. By 1827, Kangaroo Island was emu-free. Come 1865, the entire species of Tasmanian Emu had been wiped out.

A Symbol Reborn, Then Condemned Again

Yet even as the feathered corpses piled up, opinions on these flightless birds had started to change. In 1874, the state of Western Australia passed the Game Act, outlawing the killing of emus, and most of the rest of the country soon followed suit. By the dawn of the 20th century, there had been a fundamental shift in Australians’ psyches. From thinking of themselves as essentially Europeans baffled by a strange bird, people had begun to think of themselves primarily as Australians — Australians who could be proud of their nation’s incredible wildlife.

It helped that this was an era when invasive species brought from Europe were getting out of control. Rabbits, released for hunting in 1859, were rampaging across the nation by the end of the 19th century, destroying crops at eye-watering levels; the first rabbit-proof fence was constructed in 1907. Compared to such fluffy little pests, who wouldn’t prefer emus? When King Edward VII granted Australia its own coat of arms in 1908, an emu was one of two animals — along with a kangaroo — chosen to represent the recently independent country.

Sadly, this would soon turn out to be the high point in human-emu relations. Come 1918, Western Australia — faced with increasingly larger herds destroying the state’s wheat crops — had rescinded its ban on emu hunting. Just four years later, in 1922, the federal government dropped protection for the birds, reclassifying them as “vermin.” It was the beginning of another cycle of anti-emu violence — of bounties, hunts, and extermination campaigns. Only, this time, the emus would win.

Days of Depression

By the mid-1920s, it was clear the Soldier Settlement Scheme had not just failed to create agricultural paradises, but had instead created 23,000 little hells. Plunged into poverty on their tiny, often marginal tracts of land, Great War veterans were seeing surging rates of family breakdown, alcoholism, and suicide. A 1925 report admitted the scheme had fallen apart on so many fronts it was impossible to know where to start.

Two problems stood out. The first was the land itself: in Western Australia, some blocks east of Perth were so hostile to agriculture that you would have needed a team of farming experts to make them work. The second was falling wheat prices. The region around Perth is known as the Wheatbelt because that is what grows well there, and wheat was what most of the soldier settlers had turned to. Unfortunately, the 1920s saw wheat prices collapse. Suddenly, 5,000 people were growing the crop almost at a loss.

Awful as this was, it would turn out to be just the prelude — the depressing tapas before a main course of misery. If World War One was Australia’s worst war, the Great Depression would be by far its worst peacetime disaster.

The Government Reneges

In the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the Australian economy imploded. Unemployment soared to 32% — higher even than in America. Shantytowns sprang up around cities, suicide rates skyrocketed, and tens of thousands were forced into threadbare, nomadic lives while their children went hungry. For the settled soldiers, things were a new kind of awful.

Between 1929 and 1930, already-low wheat prices halved while drought hit Western Australia. In the face of such devastation, hundreds quit; of the original 5,000 veterans settled in the state, a quarter walked away.

It was at this point that the government finally woke up to the brewing crisis. Although wheat might no longer be profitable, Australia still needed to produce the crop, so in late 1929 Prime Minister James Scullin announced new subsidies to ensure farmers did not abandon their blocks. It was the steadying hand the soldier-farmers needed — and it was also complete nonsense. When harvest season arrived, the government reneged on the subsidy bill, crippling the soldier settlers financially.

All they could do was ship their wheat and hope things would be better in 1931. Briefly, they were: that year, Scullin passed another subsidy bill, for real this time. But then he lost the general election to Joseph Lyons — and the moment Lyons took office, he cancelled the wheat subsidies. As 1932’s crop season got under way, the soldier settlers were broke, angry, and now planning to hold their wheat back until they could get fair prices.

The government, meanwhile, needed their crops but was also desperate to prove it was not as cruel and out of touch as it appeared.

The Emu Blitzkrieg

Into this smouldering powder keg of resentment was about to be dropped a befeathered stick of dynamite. In the wilds, Australia’s emus were suffering too — from the drought, from a lack of food. With no other options, the birds that year went further in their migrations than usual and formed into bigger groups. By September 1932, a gigantic gang of 20,000 hungry, thirsty emus was approaching the bitterly contested wheat fields around Walgoolan, east of Perth.

The war began not with warning shots or diplomatic overtures, but with an emu blitzkrieg. In late 1932, 20,000 birds surged onto the fields of the Campion district around Walgoolan, guzzling wheat, drinking water, destroying fences, and trampling crops into dust. Overwhelmed, the soldier settlers mounted a fightback, but it was all in vain. Emus are incredibly tough — able to take not just one but multiple bullets before they even realise they have been hit.

Armed only with rifles, the veterans could not even dent their numbers. Before long, local families were reduced to chasing the emus on bicycles and hitting them on the head with sticks.

Calling In the Machine Guns

Such methods could not be scaled to deal with a herd 20,000 strong. By late September, the soldier settlers realised they had only one option. That same month, Australia’s Defence Minister, Sir George Pearce — himself a native of Western Australia — received a strange communication. A group of veterans-turned-farmers were requesting weapons, and not just any weapons.

They wanted machine guns: guns like those they had witnessed on the battlefields of World War One, guns that, less than two decades before, had mowed their comrades down by the hundreds.

Pearce informed them it was out of the question. There was no way the government could put military-grade weapons in civilian hands. But that did not mean it could not send someone authorised to use machine guns. The more Pearce thought about it, the more he became convinced this could be just the propaganda coup the government needed — a way of saying, “Sure, we cancelled your wheat subsidies, but look at us now: we’re protecting you from emus!”

And so, slowly, a hare-brained scheme began to form. Pearce checked with the military commander around Perth, who declared it would give his men excellent practice at shooting moving targets. Next, he wrote to the Farmers’ Agricultural Bank, sounding them out on whether — in return for the government declaring war on the emus — they would front the costs of food, lodging, and ammunition.

Already in dire financial straits, the bank was hesitant, but eventually a formula was worked out whereby costs would be deducted from future profits. At the last moment, as Pearce was putting his plans into motion, a colonel in the Australian Light Horse division placed an order for 1,000 emu pelts from which to make the brigade’s hats. With that, the fate of the Campion district was sealed.

First Blood

After a month’s delay due to rains, the Australian force departed Perth on 2 November. Some versions of the tale make it sound like an entire army, or at least a full company, was sent out. In reality, Sir Pearce had delegated the job to just three men. In command was Major G.P.W.

Meredith, a man about whom almost nothing is known today — not even what his initials stood for. With the mysterious major were Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran, both armed with Lewis machine guns, and a cameraman from Fox Movietone, sent along to capture what was obviously going to be a quick victory.

When Meredith and his men reached Walgoolan, they were greeted by dozens of farmers wielding rifles and cheering. Bundled into vehicles, the entire force set off into the countryside to bring the fight to the alien invader. Not long after the convoy set off, Meredith spotted a company of 50 emus. Dismounting, he ordered the gun prepared, then gave the farmers a simple command: use their vehicles to herd the emus towards the weapon.

Simple in theory; in practice, a whole other matter. As the pickup trucks approached, the emus bolted just as Meredith planned. But rather than run together as most pack animals do, the birds scattered, zooming off in all directions. As the farmers drove in circles, Sergeant McMurray tried desperately to fire on the birds, but in the chaos his bullets went wild. By the time the farmers sheepishly returned, the Australian force had killed a grand total of zero emus.

Doing the Same Thing Over and Over

Apparently, Meredith had never heard the old quote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. He instantly ordered the soldier settlers to try herding the emus again. Once again the convoy of trucks went out; once again the emus scattered; once again McMurray was left to fire wildly in the blind hope that a bullet might find a feathered enemy. This time, though, lady luck was at least not pointing and laughing.

The engagement ended with six emus dead — the first victims of the war. That left only 19,994 to go.

Still, Meredith seems to have been more than pleased with the results. The very next day, 3 November, he tried his “herding and wildly shooting” tactics all over again. This time, McMurray managed to take down nine birds. Things were clearly improving — but not fast enough. Even for the compliant press corps following the fighting, fifteen dead emus in two days was hard to spin as a victory. If Meredith wanted to be anything but a laughingstock, he was going to have to change tactics. Hence the ambush.

The Dam Ambush

Early on 4 November, Meredith and his gunners set up at a nearby dam, determined to hide until the emus came to drink. Lying low, they waited for their chance. Not long after sunrise, they got it. That morning, a crowd of emus approached the dam. Not wanting them to scatter, Meredith ordered O’Halloran to wait until the last moment — until the enemy was at point-blank range.

So O’Halloran waited. He waited until he could see their beady, amber eyes, until they were practically stepping on him. At the last second, O’Halloran pulled the trigger. The gun gave a start, fire spat, and twelve emus fell down dead — and then the gun jammed, and the birds were running away as O’Halloran presumably cursed up an Aussie storm. It was the third day of failure in a row, the third day of humiliation. And it certainly would not be the last.

A Parallel Universe of Roadrunner

To hear about the rest of that week is to feel like you have somehow stepped into a parallel universe where Roadrunner is real and Australia is Wile E. Coyote. There were additional herding attacks that, once again, failed to herd any emus. There was the time Meredith ordered a machine gun mounted on a truck to chase the birds, only for the ride to be so rough that O’Halloran could not squeeze off a single shot.

There was even paramilitary action undertaken by the farmers, such as the man who — tired of trying to herd the emus — simply rammed one with his truck. But even that was a disaster. Tangled in the wheels, the dead emu sent the truck careering off the road, smashing through a line of fencing and crushing swathes of wheat before it came to a stop. You can almost imagine Wile E. Coyote behind the wheel, holding up a big sign reading “UH-OH.”

Comparing these men to comedy characters is exactly what the rest of Australia was doing. By the end of the week, the press and politicians in Canberra were having a field day. One MP asked the government if it would forge medals to commemorate the war, only for another to declare that, if it did, they should go to the emus. And he was probably right.

Taking Stock and Withdrawing

On 8 November, Meredith took stock. Over the last week, he had expended a quarter of his ammunition. Two hundred emus had been killed — a mere 1% of the mob besieging Walgoolan. Still, as Meredith told a reporter with pained cheeriness, at least “the mission had not suffered a single human casualty.” No, the only casualty was going to be the mission itself.

The next day, 9 November, the government ordered Meredith to stop embarrassing them and withdraw. The Perth Daily News claimed it was an odd decision, since “no treaty of peace has been concluded and the emus remain in possession of disputed territory.” Yet, despite the gales of laughter, this would not be the end of the Emu War. Meredith would soon get another chance to epically humiliate himself.

The Final Campaign

The trouble with ordering Meredith to suspend operations was that it did not take care of the original problem: the massive crowd of hungry emus devastating wheat fields. It also did not take care of all the extremely angry soldier settlers, who immediately began a loud pressure campaign to bring the army back. Trapped between them and his annoyed superiors, Sir Pearce decided to let someone else deal with the problem. Rather than redeploy the machine guns, he loaned them to the state of Western Australia, which immediately subcontracted them to its most experienced men: Meredith, McMurray, and O’Halloran.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying the three returned to the field a mere four days after being told to stand down. This time, they would keep fighting for an entire month. Sadly, things would not go any better. There were more failed ambushes, more technical failures, more comic scenes of men racing after scattering emus. At some point, someone even managed to knock a gigantic hole in the local rabbit-proof fence, leading to yet another crop-destroying pest flooding through.

As the war dragged on, the criticism — and the jokes — mounted. The press dubbed Sir Pearce “Minister for the Emu War.” By 10 December, the government had had enough. Faced with a choice between pissed-off farmers and members of the public taking the mickey, they decided they could live easier with the farmers. The war was cancelled that same day.

Meredith’s Verdict

In his final report, Meredith boasted of having killed nearly 1,000 emus — a number many believe wildly inflated. He also added, a touch wistfully: “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world. They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”

The aftermath of the fiasco was brutal for the government, yet strangely cheerful for almost everyone else. For 90% of Australians, the Great Emu War was exactly what their souls had needed: an escape from the misery of the Great Depression, a source of laughter in a world that seemed to have forgotten how to laugh. Yet while it was an amusing distraction for most, for the soldier settlers the loss of the Emu War was simply another letdown by a government that had failed them so much already.

The Long War After the War

Following Meredith’s final withdrawal, the government sent bills to the farmers, demanding they pay up for the ammunition used. Some of the soldier settlers wrote back demanding the government pay them instead, billing it for the food Meredith and his gunners had consumed. Mostly, though, the farmers seem to have realised there was nothing to do but take matters into their own hands.

Over the following years, emu culling expeditions became a feature of the Wheatbelt, with one managing to bag over 57,000 birds in just six months. Yet even this was far from enough to save the crops. In 1934, 1938, and again in 1943, the farmers begged the Australian government to return to their aid, to no avail. In 1943, things were so bad that some even suggested bombing the emus from the air.

Having been burned by one ridiculous war, though, the military demurred. With the government refusing to help, more and more farms failed, more and more soldier settlers went bust and abandoned the land, and more and more lives were plunged into misery.

An Expensive Solution and a Final Reversal

Finally, in the 1950s, Western Australia agreed to shell out on an expensive solution: an emu-proof fence. Stretching 217 kilometres, it eventually cut the Wheatbelt off from the migrating birds. Slowly, those farms that had managed to survive began to recover — even to thrive. And that led to another sea change in attitudes towards the humble emu. In 1999, it was again reclassified — this time from “vermin” to “protected species.” It still holds this status today.

So what are we to make of Australia’s Great Emu War? It is certainly the dumbest conflict imaginable — the history-equivalent of hiding a whoopee cushion in your grandmother’s favourite chair. Yet for all its silliness, there was a serious side to this nonsense conflict, one that is perhaps too frequently ignored. Strange as it was, the Emu War was only made possible by the suffering of veterans from a real war: veterans who had been promised a paradise by their government and returned to find only dust and misery.

In the dark and violent world in which we increasingly find ourselves living, it is good to laugh — good to occasionally learn of a silly conflict between man and bird. But we should never forget that, in many ways, Australia’s greatest military failure was also a failure on a deeper level: the failure of a government to care for its own heroes.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why were Australian soldiers sent to fight emus?

After World War One, the Soldier Settlement Scheme placed returned veterans on small, often marginal blocks of farmland in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. Drought, collapsing wheat prices, and the Great Depression left them desperate. In 1932 a migration of roughly 20,000 hungry emus surged onto their fields, destroying crops and fences, and the farmers could not stop the birds with rifles alone.

Why did the military campaign fail so completely?

Emus proved incredibly tough, able to absorb multiple bullets before going down, and they scattered in all directions rather than running together as planned, frustrating repeated attempts to herd them toward the guns. Ambushes failed, guns jammed at crucial moments, and rough terrain prevented the gunners from firing effectively from moving vehicles. By 8 November, after expending a quarter of their ammunition, the three-man force had killed only about 200 birds — roughly 1% of the mob.

Who commanded the operation and how small was the force?

The government delegated the job to just three men: Major G.P.W. Meredith in command, with Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran, both armed with Lewis machine guns. A Fox Movietone cameraman also came along to record what everyone expected would be a quick, newsworthy victory.

How did the Australian public react to the war?

For about 90% of Australians, the conflict was a welcome distraction from the misery of the Great Depression. The press mocked it relentlessly, politicians in Canberra joked about forging medals for the emus, and Defence Minister Sir George Pearce was dubbed “Minister for the Emu War” — a nickname that stuck.

How was the emu problem eventually solved?

After years of failed culling campaigns and repeated government refusals to help, Western Australia built a 217-kilometre emu-proof fence in the 1950s, finally cutting the Wheatbelt off from the migrating birds. Surviving farms slowly recovered, and in 1999 the emu was reclassified from “vermin” to a protected species, a status it still holds today.