Who won the Great Emu War? The surreal wildlife management conflict in Australia

The 20th century, like many in history, was dominated by numerous destructive conflicts. The Boxer Rebellion, the First World War, the Chinese Civil War, the Emu War, and the Spanish Civil War all took place before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

One of those is the odd one out, shouldn’t be too hard to guess which.

The Emu War is one of histories great oddities. It wasn’t really a war, rather an operation to cull the emu population in Western Australia which was threatening to ruin the crops. This Australian state is large, barren, and far from anywhere else in the rest of the country.

A poor economy, coupled with the large amount of unemployed former soldiers after the First World War made this wheat crop invaluable; the soldier-farmers needed the work. Once wild emus began encroaching on their land, the farmers petitioned the federal government to help put down the menace, which was thought to be 20,000 strong.

These soldier-farmers received two machine guns and were deployed on 2 November 1932. After initial promise, that is gunning down dozens of flightless birds, the operation petered out.

“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world,” said Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith, the group’s commander.

“They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop (dum-dum bullets are hollow ammunition that were designed for hunting elephants),” he continued.

Media reports and cartoons mocked the government’s efforts, and the Emu War was widely seen as a futile and absurd exercise.

Clearly, this whole thing seems like a giant farce, but it is a true story. After a month of ‘fighting’, the soldier-farmers had killed 986 emus and wounded 2,500 that would later die of their wounds according to Major Meredith’s report.

Despite the official war ending in 1932, fighting against the emus continued until 1948 with bounties for emu skins.