Feathers and Fury: Australia's Lost War Against the Emus

How machine guns, monoculture, and settler delusions failed to tame the land or the birds.

Dec 30, 2024

A handsome Emu. Bicheno, Tasmania. June 2015.

In 1932, Australia declared war on emus.

Not metaphorically. Not as a colourful turn of phrase. Literally. The Australian government sent men with machine guns to Western Australia to shoot large, flightless birds. To be fair, for the uninitiated, an emu is essentially what you'd get if you asked a chicken to describe its nightmare. A towering, flightless bird, an emu is roughly six feet of misplaced ambition and feathery resentment. Its neck - far too long to be trusted - snakes upward, ending in a small, suspicious head that looks perpetually disappointed in you. Not angry, just disappointed.

The birds won. Human beings have an astonishing ability to lose battles with nature and then double down, sometimes with more guns, sometimes with poisonous amphibians, and sometimes with the sheer weight of our own delusions.

Let's start with the facts. It was 1932. The Great Depression had turned Australia into an even bleaker version of itself, no small feat, and farmers in WA were doing it tough. Many of them were ex-soldiers who'd survived Gallipoli and the Western Front, only to be shipped home and handed marginal farmland like it was a consolation prize. "Sorry about the shellshock, fellas, have a paddock!"

The government promised subsidies for wheat, then quietly reneged when the economy tanked. By the time the emus showed up, 20,000 strong, marching out of the desert like feathered spectres of ruin, the farmers had already been through one war, two droughts, and countless lies. They were primed for a fight.

And the emus? The emus were living their lives. They weren't invaders; they were locals. Prehistoric-looking, yes, like dinosaurs who'd survived the asteroid out of sheer spite, but locals nonetheless. The wheatfields were paradise: food, water, no predators. The farmers saw disaster. The emus saw brunch.

I'll admit my biases up front: I'm Team Emu. Where I come from, Burnie, on Tasmania's north west coast, the town's history is tangled up with these birds. The bay it sits on is called Emu Bay. The river that flows through it? Emu River. For a time, Burnie itself was called Emu Bay. And maybe that's why the extinction of Tasmania's emus feels so personal.

Emu River #3. Fern Glade, Burnie, Tasmania. March 2018.

Our emus, a subspecies, were wiped out by 1865. Farmers hunted them relentlessly, sometimes with specially bred dogs, clearing land for sheep, cows and crops. They poisoned, fenced and burned until the birds were gone. The last Tasmanian emu died in captivity.

So when I hear about the Emu War, how settlers brought machine guns to fight birds, I can't help but feel like I've seen this before. It's the same story. The same panic, the same violence, the same delusion that the land can be bent to our will without breaking it. It's just that, this time, the emus refused to go quietly.

Now, there is something that those farmers refused to see: what had been violently stripped from the land along with its first custodians. This wasn't their land to claim or defend. It had belonged to the Ballardong people of the Noongar Nation for tens of thousands of years, and the emus were part of that inheritance. In Noongar culture, emus weren't pests, they were totems, symbols of fertility, survival, and balance. The land and its creatures weren't resources to be plundered but kin to be respected. The farmers saw enemies; the Ballardong saw Country.

By 1932, though, the Ballardong had already been pushed aside, dispossessed, displaced and excluded from decisions about the land they had cared for. Settlers didn't just ignore Aboriginal practices; they actively dismantled them, burning knowledge along with the bush. The Emu War wasn't just a skirmish between soldiers and birds; it was another act in the long war settlers waged against the land and the people who understood it.

So, the farmers called for help. And the government, perhaps unsure how else to apologise for starving them, obliged. Enter Major G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery, two soldiers, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. A force so over-equipped it suggests someone, somewhere, had a grudge against birds.

The first battle took place on 2 November 1932. Meredith and his men spotted 50 emus and opened fire. The birds scattered. They ran in all directions, low and fast, like feathered cruise missiles. A few died, but most got away. The soldiers tried again the next day, facing a thousand emus this time. They waited until the birds came close, then opened fire. The gun jammed. The emus fled.

Over the next few weeks, Meredith tried everything. Ambushes. Moving targets. Truck-mounted guns. Nothing worked. The trucks couldn't keep up, the ride was too rough, and the gunners couldn't aim.

Meanwhile, the emus seemed to be learning. Packs had leaders now, big, black-plumed sentinels who stood watch while the others ate, like feathered mafiosos. At the first sign of trouble, the leader would signal, and the whole mob would scatter.

By mid-November, the government pulled the plug. Meredith claimed 986 kills and admitted he'd fired 9,860 rounds of ammunition. Perhaps losing touch with reality by this point, he compared them to tanks, unstoppable, impenetrable. Of course, this is what one says when one loses a war to tall poultry.

In essence, the emu is less an animal and more a critique of human arrogance. It doesn't just survive in hostile environments; it thrives, staring down droughts, predators, and government-issued machine guns with the same blank expression. It is both absurd and terrifying, the physical embodiment of the phrase "This is none of your business."

As for the farmers, their livelihoods were at stake. Their fields had been flattened. Their fences were wrecked. And what did they get in return? A farcical war, a few dozen dead birds and headlines that turned them into the butt of international jokes.

Jean Baudrillard argued that "Power belongs to those who can create signs, not meanings." The Emu War has something of that about it; a spectacle of control staged with machine guns and very large birds. The guns symbolised dominance over nature, but the reality - the emus scattering, regrouping, and surviving - exposed the illusion. Beneath the theatrics lay deeper failures: ecological mismanagement, settler panic, and the erasure of Aboriginal knowledge that had sustained the land for thousands of years. The war's sign was power; its meaning was loss.

So, I'd like to shift focus to the people whose relationship with the land was ignored: the Ballardong Noongar people. For them, emus weren't vermin; they were totems, symbols of balance and survival. Their knowledge systems weren't about control but coexistence, adapting to the land rather than declaring war on it.

The settlers reduced the emus to a pest problem because they couldn't see (or refused to see) what the Ballardong people knew: that the emus were part of the ecosystem's logic, not intruders. From this perspective, the emus' resilience could be read as justice, the land pushing back against the settlers' arrogance, refusing to bow to the illusion of control.

The Emu War was a sign of colonial control but also a failure of meaning, an attempt to assert dominance over nature that only exposed the settlers' vulnerability and ignorance. The Ballardong people's perspective reminds us that nature doesn't obey the symbols we impose on it. The emus' survival wasn't just defiance—it was a correction, a reminder that the land belongs to itself, not to those who claim it.

The same logic that brought machine guns to an emu fight produced the cane toad catastrophe. In 1935, Queensland scientists, inspired by half-baked successes in Hawaii, imported 102 cane toads to combat beetles plaguing sugarcane crops. It seemed elegant: deploy one species to police another, a biological SWAT team of sorts. But it hinged on assumptions: that the toads would eat the beetles, that the beetles would oblige by staying near the ground, and that nothing else would go wrong.

Everything went wrong. The beetles lived higher up the sugarcane stalks, out of the toads’ reach. The toads, unfazed, turned their appetite on everything else: frogs, insects, small mammals, even native lizards and snakes. They bred furiously, each female producing up to 30,000 eggs, and with no predators to keep them in check, they surged across the landscape like toxic floodwaters. Their skin oozes bufotoxin, a poison strong enough to kill anything foolish enough to take a bite: dogs, goannas, even freshwater crocodiles.

By the time anyone realised the scale of the disaster, it was too late. The toads marched out of Queensland, spreading across the Northern Territory and into Western Australia, leaving ecological devastation in their wake. Today, they occupy over 1.3 million square kilometres, and despite millions spent on traps, fences and baiting programs, there’s no stopping them. They’re still spreading, like a slow-motion apocalypse with legs.

The toads and the Emu War share the same flawed logic: the belief that nature can be controlled with brute force or a quick fix. Both expose a deeper truth. Ecosystems don’t work like machines. They resist, adapt, and overwhelm, whether it’s through emus scattering machine-gun fire or toads poisoning predators faster than they can learn not to eat them.

Both disasters, the Emu War and the Cane Toad Invasion reveal the same blind spot. Settlers treated the land like a machine, something that could be fine-tuned or fixed with enough force. They ignored thousands of years of Aboriginal knowledge that treated the land as alive, as something you adapt to, not something you conquer. The cane toads didn't care about our plans. Neither did the emus.

So here’s to the emus: scruffy, stubborn, and smarter than we gave them credit for. And here’s to the toads, hopping their way across the continent like a toxic punchline no one’s laughing at.

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