Alright! ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT!!! I RELENT!
I’LL DO THE GREAT EMU WAR GODDAMNIT!
BUT DON’T EXPECT A WELL POLISHED ONE!
Let’s begin.
OH NO! It’s the late 1920s! (1929) and you know what that means!?
Let’s make the Earth VERY DEPRESSED YIPPEE!!!
And so the Earth became very depressed, and everything became expensive.
Meanwhile, many Australian ww1 veterans were doing it good after returning home from the great war. They were provided with large quantities of land by the government and many of which became farmers.
However, due to the great depression, many of these farmers could no longer sustain their farms anymore, and left for the cities. There were still a lot of farmers left, but unfortunately for them, there would be one pesky little type of bird that would make their life so much harder tenfold.
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This is the “Dromaius novaehollandiae”, a flightless bird belonging to the group of flightless birds called “Ratite”, which is part of the Palaeognathae class.
More commonly known as the emus, these birds were known to run at insane speeds, reaching to speeds of up to a maximum of 50km/h, or 31mph whilst sprinting. They would weight an average of 37kg (adult female) and 32kg (adult male) and their eggs would weight about 400 to 700 grams. (ALSO THEY ARE BLOODY DELICIOUS! TASTES LIKE BEEF!)
Anyways, when these emus would absolutely indulge themselves by eating the wheat the farmers had toiled so hard to grow. Wooden fences cannot stop them. So the farmers, instead of going to the Minister of Agriculture, went straight to the Minister of Defence (Sir George Pearce), and demanded the military do something, because the farmers were going broke, and they had had enough.
Although this plan was very stupid, the government was on board with the idea.
And so, this plan was to go ahead. The Australian Army would send Major G.P.W (Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey. Idk what kinda name is this) Meredith of the 7th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery regiment, along with two soldiers armed with Lewis (ish) machine guns to deal with the pesky emus in Western Australia. Basically, their plan was to:
COMMIT.
MASS.
GENOCIDE.
(Just like the Isr-explodes and gets cancelled immediately)
On the 20,000 emus that were ravaging South-western Australian farmlands.
Turns out this plan was very inefficient. I won’t get into too much depth, but tldr, these emus were hella tanky. With Major G.P.W Meredith saying himself:
“If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world. They could face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
In total, out of the goal of killing 20,000 emus, only 1,000 emus were killed, and the two Australian soldiers and the Major churned through thousands of ammunition.
So with the staggering costs, it was fair to say, that the emus won. They did introduce a bounty system after, which was much more successful.
(Red = Approximate Area of Operations)
TLDR: Thousands of emus made a global economic crisis even worse. And they called the Australian military to deal with the absurd numbers. The soldiers churned through thousands of ammunition and dollars and resulted in massive losses, and so it was declared emus were the victor.
Sources (videos if you want to watch):
Oversimplified (The absolute GOAT of history):
Simple History:
ABC Australia:
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It is so sad and disheartening to see that Australia’s military, from the Australian Imperial Force in the past until the Australian Defence Force in the present, will always be tainted with the stain that we lost to a bunch of goofy ahh birds. And so writing this filled me with anger and shame, but mostly goofy anger.
When I eventually and inevitably enlist into the Army, I shall do everything in my might to wipe this stain off Australia’s military trust.
Anyways I didn’t write much cuz I have a math exam tomorrow and I gotta revise so thanks for coming to my history lesson and bye.
