In November 1932, three gunners disembarked from the Perth train at Campion, equipped with two Lewis machine guns, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and the optimistic hope of returning home for Christmas.
Their adversary was flightless, which was the sole advantage everyone had from the outset.
The reason behind twenty thousand birds’ arrival
After the First World War, returned servicemen settled throughout the Western Australian Wheatbelt, occupying marginal lands with poor soil and unpredictable rainfall. The Great Depression then caused wheat prices to plunge, leading to the suggestion from Canberra for men already in distress to increase wheat production. Murray Johnson, a historian at the University of Queensland, delved into that resettlement initiative and its collapse in the Journal of Australian Studies, where emus appeared late in a narrative that was already deteriorating.
Drought conditions in the interior drove approximately 20,000 emus into the cropping regions surrounding Campion and Walgoolan. Ralph English, whose father farmed adjacent to the battlefield in 1932, recounted to ABC Midwest and Wheatbelt that the damage from trampling was greater than that from consumption. The birds did not so much eat the crop as they crushed it.
The initial six days
Major Meredith commenced firing on 2 November. Local newspapers characterized his team as determined to eliminate thousands. The first day resulted in around twenty dead emus. It became evident that emus did not act like infantry: rather than gathering in open areas, they scattered into smaller groups and ran at full speed, which was precisely the wrong kind of target for a weapon designed to engage a static line.
Two days later, the gunners attempted an ambush at a nearby waterhole. Roughly a thousand birds approached to drink, the Lewis gun malfunctioned early, and twelve of them were killed, as Rebecca Toy reported for National Geographic. Meredith’s perception of the adversary, as quoted in the ABC’s report, has persisted beyond all other details: they “could confront machine guns with the imperviousness of tanks”. His unit withdrew on 8 November after expending 2,500 rounds to kill between three and five hundred emus.
Who financed the ammunition
“Who is accountable for this absurdity, and who is paying for it?” Harold Thornby posed that question to the House of Representatives on 8 November, and that was one of the milder inquiries. Richard Cook and Srđan Jovanović, in a paper published in the Romanian Journal of Historical Studies, tracked the invoices. Settlers and wheat producers had consented to pay for the ammunition, with the Agricultural Bank compensating the army and acquiring a lien on their crops. One Walgoolan farmer, who received a bill for £24, responded by noting that the soldiers had conducted their operations in his automobile, which they had also damaged.
Wendy Porter, who oversees the library at Merredin and has reviewed local newspapers from that era, discovered two farmers who attempted to settle their tax obligations with dead emus. She also interprets political implications in the deployment. It coincided with the peak of the Western Australian secessionist movement, as wheat growers expressed to the federal government that they could manage independently.
What actually succeeded
Did the second attempt prove more effective? At some point, someone fastened a machine gun to the rear of a truck, intending to keep up with birds that easily outpaced it over rugged terrain; at least one truck ended up crashing into a fence. Pressure from settlers and the state premier resulted in the reintroduction of the guns on 12 November, and Meredith claimed thousands of kills prior to a final retreat on 10 December.
There has never been a consensus on the total count. Toy’s report estimates the entire 45-day operation at around 2,500 emus, a negligible figure compared to the 20,000 that had initially migrated south. The government’s next action was