In 1932, the Australian military deployed soldiers armed with Lewis machine guns to combat a crop-destroying population of 20,000 emus. Despite firing thousands of rounds, the highly agile birds easily evaded the troops, leading to an embarrassing military withdrawal and an outright victory for the emus.
Post-War Settlement and an Unforeseen Crisis
Following the First World War, the Australian government established soldier settlement schemes across Western Australia, offering tracts of marginal land to returning veterans to cultivate wheat and raise sheep. These newly minted farmers faced severe hardships from the outset. By the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, global wheat prices had collapsed, and promised government subsidies failed to materialize. The struggling farmers in the Campion and Walgoolan districts were already pushed to the brink of financial insolvency when an entirely separate ecological complication arrived in the spring of 1932.
The emu, a large flightless bird native to Australia, undertakes regular annual migrations from inland breeding regions toward coastal and agricultural zones in search of food and water. In 1932, an estimated 20,000 emus discovered the newly cleared and cultivated wheat belt. The birds found an ideal habitat filled with standing crops and readily available stock water supplies created by agricultural irrigation. As the massive population descended on the cultivated fields, they began devouring crops, trampling vast swathes of grain, and breaking gaps through wire fences that allowed invasive rabbits to flood into the fields, compounding the destruction.
The Decision to Deploy the Military
A delegation of ex-soldier settlers approached the Australian government for assistance. Familiar with the power of military hardware from their service in the war, the farmers specifically lobbied for machine guns rather than standard civilian pest-control assistance. They presented their case directly to Sir George Pearce, the Minister of Defence. Pearce agreed to deploy military personnel, seeing the operation as practical live-fire target practice for troops and a visible demonstration of government support for desperate rural constituents.
The deployment terms required the Western Australian government to cover transportation costs and the farmers to provide food, accommodation, and ammunition funding. Command of the operation was assigned to Major G.P. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, Seventh Heavy Battery. Meredith led a small detachment consisting of Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O'Halloran, armed with two Lewis automatic machine guns and an allocation of 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The operation was briefly delayed by unseasonal rainfall that dispersed the emu flocks, but Meredith's unit officially commenced operations in Campion in early November 1932.
Tactical Failures in the First Campaign
The military quickly discovered that emus did not behave like conventional infantry targets. On November 2, the soldiers engaged a flock of approximately 50 birds, but the targets scattered rapidly in all directions, rendering the fixed-line machine gun fire largely ineffective. Two days later, Meredith set an ambush near a local dam where over 1,000 emus were spotted approaching the water. The gunners held their fire until the birds were at close range, but after dropping only a small fraction of the flock, the Lewis gun jammed, allowing the remaining birds to flee into the scrub.
Meredith subsequently attempted to increase the unit's mobility by mounting a Lewis gun on the bed of a truck to chase the birds across the open plain. This tactic failed almost immediately; the rough, stump-filled terrain made the ride so violent that the gunner could not aim or fire safely, and the agile emus easily outpaced and outmaneuvered the vehicle. Observers and participants noted that the birds seemed to divide into small groups under the leadership of a sentry bird that warned the flock of approaching danger. After six days of operations, the military had expended roughly 2,500 rounds of ammunition for a confirmed tally of only a few hundred birds, prompting a flurry of negative press and parliamentary debate that led Defence Minister Pearce to order an immediate withdrawal on November 8.
The Second Offensive and Withdrawal
The military withdrawal brought little relief to the farmers, as emus continued to destroy crops across the region. Local agricultural representatives and the Premier of Western Australia lobbied heavily for the return of the troops, arguing that the emu population posed an existential threat to the harvest. Citing reports that the birds were continuing their devastation, Pearce authorized Major Meredith to resume the offensive on November 12, 1932.
The second phase of the operation proved somewhat more systematic than the first. Operating through early December, Meredith's detachment adjusted their positioning, engaging smaller groups around watering points with greater patience. By the time the unit was permanently recalled on December 10, Meredith claimed that exactly 986 emus had been confirmed killed, with an additional proportion estimated to have died of injuries, at an expenditure of 9,860 rounds—a ratio of almost ten rounds per confirmed kill. While Meredith defended the operation's utility, the vast majority of the 20,000 emus remained entirely unaffected.
Alternative Solutions and Conservation Legacy
In the years that followed, farmers submitted renewed requests for military machine gun deployments in 1934, 1943, and 1948, but the federal government repeatedly refused to intervene again. Instead, the problem was managed through an expanded bounty system that had been introduced under Western Australian state legislation. The bounty proved significantly more effective than heavy artillery; over a single six-month period in 1934, bounties were claimed on more than 57,000 emus as local hunters and landowners targeted the birds individually across broad territories.
In the longer term, the agricultural community turned to exclusion fencing to protect crops. The extension and maintenance of the State Barrier Fence (originally established as the Rabbit-Proof Fence) provided an enduring physical barrier that blocked migrating emu flocks from entering wheat fields without requiring military action. As ecological understanding developed in the late 20th century, the emu came under full legal protection as a native species under Western Australian fauna protection laws, transforming the bird from an agricultural pest into a federally protected symbol of native biodiversity.
Key takeaways
•The 1932 Emu War was initiated when 20,000 migrating emus entered the Western Australian wheat belt during the Great Depression, destroying crops and breaching fences.
•The Royal Australian Artillery deployed two Lewis machine guns under Major G.P. Meredith, but the birds' agility, dispersal tactics, and tough hides made heavy gunfire ineffective.
•After two separate military campaigns expended nearly 10,000 rounds of ammunition with minimal impact, the army withdrew and the government refused future military deployments.
•Long-term management of emu populations shifted to civilian bounty systems and exclusion fencing, culminating in full modern legal protection for the birds as native wildlife.