Liam O'Leary
While taking part in EYP it's easy for you to see the great advances humankind has made with new leaps in technology bringing about trends of urbanisation, large transport infrastructures connecting continents and new smarter energy-efficient grids being established. Then you find out that one fine day in 1932 there was genuinely a war between people and emus and you begin to question humanity's choices a small bit.
Enter Australia! The land down under, filled with vegemite sandwiches and deadly animals around every corner. From snakes to stonefish the Australian wildlife sure do cause the locals some spot of trouble. It should be no wonder then that the flightless, ostrich-like emu can be quite a nuisance to the citizens of the outback.
Following the events of World War I, thousands of army veterans took up farming in Western Australia as part of soldier settlement programs. Unfortunately, many crops in the subsequent years failed due to drought. This then led to wild emus eating whatever was left of the land. Due to inflation after the war, many couldn't afford fences to keep out the emus and thus turned to fending off their land by killing some 3,000 emus by means of gun ammunition in 1928.
That said, things took a strange turn in 1932 when a marauding mob of 20,000 emus stormed farmer's fields and devastated their crops. These ex-veterans had to do something! As opposed to doing the logical thing and lodging a complaint to the Ministry of Agriculture, the farmers instead turned to the Ministry of Defence who essentially declared war on these flightless foes and ludicrously provided them with machine guns, ammunition and assigned Major C.W.P Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery to deal with the feathered friends.
This extreme measure would presumably guarantee an easy victory for the Australian government right? Not quite, soon after Meredith and his merry men set off they realised just how much they had underestimated the emu. The cunning creatures were much faster than expected, easily outmaneuvering the soldiers. Meredith rethought his strategy and decided to hunt the emus with machine gun mounted trucks. However, this tactic was only responsible for a single emu casualty which in turn caused the truck to crash and destroy someone's fence.
After only a week, the troop embarrassingly had to be recalled. With only a twentieth of the emus defeated and an average of ten bullets allocated to each emu, I think it's safe to say that the emus won this one. Later, the question of whether medals would be awarded for this war was posed to Parliament. Labour Parliamentarian, A.E Green responded that the honorary medals should rightly go to the emus who "have won every round so far". Major Meredith himself also commented on the events stating. "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."
Today the emu population is thriving. Thankfully it doesn't seem like they have any interest in resuming conflicts with the Australian government anytime soon,. In fact, they are now proudly represented on the Australian coat of arms!
Sources: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/18516559 , http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/history/the-great-australian-emu-war.aspx , http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/longstoryshort/the-emu-wars/4681232 , http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/07/18/the-emu-war-of-1932/ , http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2952/did-the-australian-army-once-wage-war-on-emus ,
Emu Image taken at Fota Wildlife Park: http://www.fotawildlife.ie/
Emu Mob has a Free Documentation License: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emu_mob_set_free.jpg
