The Invulnerability of Tanks
In 1932, Western Australian farmers begged their government for military help against an enemy trampling their wheat. The government sent machine guns. The enemy won.
On the morning of November 2, 1932, three soldiers stepped off a train at Campion, a speck of a settlement in the Western Australian wheat belt, carrying two Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. They had been sent by the Commonwealth government of Australia to fight a war. Within minutes of arriving, they had their first sighting of the enemy: a loose flock of about fifty birds, grazing in the stubble of a ruined wheat field, utterly unconcerned.
The soldiers were regulars of the Royal Australian Artillery’s Seventh Heavy Battery. The enemy was the emu — a flightless bird that stands up to six feet tall, can’t be goaded into panic, and, as the men were about to discover, does not hold still for an ambush.
Emus are strange animals to try to fight with a weapon built for trench warfare. They’re the second-largest bird alive, after the ostrich, and they’re built for endurance rather than speed in a straight line: strong legs, a low centre of gravity, and an instinct, when startled, to scatter rather than flee as a group. A herd of cattle panics in a single direction and can be driven; a flock of emus under pressure simply comes apart, each bird choosing its own route through the scrub. It’s a survival strategy evolved against dingoes and eagles, not against men with machine guns — but it turned out to work almost as well against the second thing as the first.
This was the Emu War, and by any conventional measure of who wins a war, Australia lost it.
A settlement scheme with no plan for what came next
To understand why a national government dispatched machine guns against birds, you have to go back to the years just after the First World War, when Australia — like Britain, Canada, and other combatant nations — tried to solve two problems with one gesture. It had tens of thousands of returning soldiers who needed a livelihood, and it had enormous tracts of undeveloped land it wanted settled. The solution was the soldier settlement scheme: veterans were granted blocks of land, often in marginal, barely surveyed country, and encouraged to turn them into farms.
In Western Australia, around 5,000 ex-servicemen took up the offer and moved into the wheat belt east of Perth, clearing scrub and planting wheat on soil nobody had properly tested. By 1929, before the Depression had even fully arrived, some 1,500 of them had already walked away — the land simply couldn’t support what the government had promised.
Then came the crash. Wheat prices, already thin, collapsed further in 1930. Farm foreclosures in Western Australia climbed sharply. The federal government dangled the promise of a subsidy to keep wheat farmers planting through the crisis, and farmers — with nothing else on offer — kept planting, waiting on assistance that was repeatedly promised and repeatedly delayed.
Into this already grim picture walked, quite literally, around 20,000 emus.
An unstoppable migration
Emus are nomadic. After their breeding season inland, they move in search of water and food, and in 1932 their route brought a huge number of them crashing through the fences separating the wheatbelt’s inland pasture from the newly cleared farms around Campion and the nearby town of Walgoolan. Rabbit-proof fences meant to keep pests out did nothing to stop a six-foot bird; the emus simply went through or around them, opening gaps that let rabbits in behind them. Once inside the cleared land, the birds ate the wheat, trampled far more than they ate, and drank from the farmers’ scarce water supplies.
For men who were already losing a fight against drought, debt, and collapsed prices, it was too much. Fences meant something concrete to a settler farmer in this position — they were the line between a crop that might get harvested and one that wouldn’t — and the emus were flattening them by the mile, county by county, on their way through. Rabbits followed the birds in through the broken wire, adding a second infestation to the first. A deputation of farmers — many of them the same veterans the settlement scheme had placed there a decade earlier — travelled to see the Minister of Defence, Sir George Pearce, and made their case in terms that were hard for a government to refuse: they had served their country once, and now they needed it to serve them. They asked, specifically, for machine guns.
Pearce said yes. It wasn’t purely sentimental. The request landed in front of a Defence Minister who had a standing army with very little to do and a limited budget to justify keeping it that way; sending troops to help farmers offered good publicity and a live-fire training exercise, at Western Australia’s expense — the state government agreed to cover transport, accommodations, and ammunition. Pearce assigned the job to Major G.P.W. Meredith, with Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran under him, two Lewis guns, and a cinematographer to film the whole thing for an Australian newsreel. Someone, somewhere in the planning of Operation Emu, was confident enough in the outcome to want it on camera.
First contact
That confidence didn’t survive the first afternoon.
The fifty birds spotted on November 2 were too far out for the guns’ effective range, so local settlers tried to herd them toward the soldiers, the way you’d drive cattle. It didn’t work. Rather than bunching up, the emus split into small, scattered groups the moment they sensed pressure, each cluster running its own direction. The few shots the gunners managed to get off did little. A second, smaller flock encountered later that day fared only slightly worse — perhaps a dozen birds killed, out of thousands loose across the district.
Two days later, on November 4, Meredith’s men got what looked like a far better opportunity. Close to a dam where the birds came to drink, more than a thousand emus had gathered — an enormous, concentrated target. The soldiers waited, let the flock come in close, and opened fire at what should have been point-blank range.
The gun jammed after twelve birds went down. The rest of the flock, a thousand-strong moment before, scattered into the scrub in every direction, and by the time the gun was working again there was nothing left to shoot at.
It kept happening. The Lewis gun, built for the mud and static lines of the Western Front, choked on outback dust and the stop-start rhythm of firing at a target that refused to stand in one place. When the soldiers tried mounting a gun on the back of a truck for mobility, the plan collapsed against the terrain: the vehicle couldn’t match the birds’ speed — emus can run in bursts approaching 50 kilometres an hour — and the roads were rough enough that keeping the gun aimed at all while moving was close to impossible.
Meredith, reporting back up the chain, gave the assessment that would end up attached to his name for the next century: “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world,” he said. “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.”
Recalled, in disgrace
Word of how the campaign was actually going reached Canberra fast, and it landed badly. In Parliament, the opposition hammered the government daily over the cost and the spectacle of it — soldiers, machine guns, thousands of rounds of Commonwealth ammunition, all apparently losing to birds. One senator took to referring to Pearce sarcastically as the “Minister of the Emu War.” An MP demanded to know who exactly was responsible for “this farce, and who is footing the bill.” When someone in the chamber asked, not entirely joking, whether a medal ought to be struck for the men who’d taken part, the reply came back that any medal should go to the emus, who had “won every round so far.”
The press had even more fun with it. Newspapers ran the story with headlines like “Emus Defeat the Army” and “Machine-Gunners Outwitted by Birds,” treating the whole affair less as a military dispatch than as farce. Within about a week of the first shots being fired, the troops were pulled out.
That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
A second act nobody wanted to publicise
The emus, of course, hadn’t gone anywhere, and the farmers were no better off than before the army had arrived — arguably worse, having watched a demonstration of just how hard the birds were to actually kill. They petitioned again. This time the government agreed to send Meredith and his men back out, but quietly: no fanfare, no repeat of the publicity that had backfired so badly the first time.
The second campaign ran from mid-November through December 10, and it went somewhat better, if “somewhat” is doing a lot of work. Meredith’s men had learned to work in smaller, more mobile groups and to pick their ambush points with more care. His official report at the end claimed 986 emus killed for 9,860 rounds fired — a suspiciously tidy ratio of exactly ten bullets per confirmed kill — plus an estimate that a further 2,500 wounded birds had likely died later of their injuries, uncounted. Even contemporaries treated the 986 figure skeptically; nobody was independently verifying kills in scrubland with a bird that, wounded, could keep running.
Whatever the real number was, it was nowhere near enough. Against a population estimated at 20,000, and against the ongoing damage to crops and fences, the operation had cost far more in ammunition, transport, and soldiers’ time than it had achieved. On December 10, Meredith and his men were recalled for good. When farmers asked for military assistance against emus again in later years, the request was refused. The army wanted no further part of it.
The method that actually worked
The problem the emus posed didn’t disappear — it just stopped being the army’s problem. In 1934, the Western Australian government tried something far less dramatic than machine guns: it offered a bounty for dead emus and let local farmers, armed with their own rifles, do the shooting. Over six months, farmers claimed more than 57,000 bounties — dramatically more birds killed, at a fraction of the cost, than two Lewis guns and thousands of rounds of Commonwealth ammunition had managed over six weeks. Fencing improvements followed, better suited to actually keeping a six-foot bird out of a wheat field than a rabbit barrier ever was.
It’s a detail that undercuts the joke a little: individual farmers with ordinary rifles, working patiently and locally, outperformed a professional military operation built around a weapon designed for trench warfare. The Lewis gun’s whole design logic — concentrated, sustained fire against a stationary or slow-moving mass of enemy troops — was close to useless against an animal that scattered the instant it felt threatened. The army had brought the wrong kind of solution to the problem and then, for reasons of politics and publicity as much as agriculture, tried it again after the first attempt failed publicly.
What’s left of it now
The Emu War is remembered today mostly as a punchline — “the war Australia lost to birds” — and it’s not hard to see why, given Meredith’s quote and the newspaper headlines. But it’s a genuinely well-documented episode: it drew formal reports, parliamentary debate transcripts, contemporary newspaper coverage, and later academic study, including a detailed 2006 paper by historian Murray Johnson that dug through the original correspondence between the farmers, the state government, and Canberra.
There’s one more layer to it that tends to circulate as trivia rather than fact, and is worth flagging as exactly that: the popular claim that the emu and the kangaroo were chosen for Australia’s coat of arms because neither animal can walk backward, supposedly symbolising a nation that only moves forward. It’s a charming story, repeated constantly — and it is, as far as the historical record of the coat of arms’s actual design process shows, folklore rather than a documented reason, since emus can and occasionally do move backward. What isn’t folklore is the animal’s current legal status: emus are a protected native species in Australia today, and culling them now requires a government permit — a fairly quiet ending for a bird that a national government once formally deployed machine guns against, and still couldn’t beat.