March 29, 2013 • 25 mins
After World War I, Australian and British soldiers moved to rural Australia. In 1932, about 20,000 emus began making their way through Campion and Walgoolan, severely damaging wheat farms. The military tried to help, but may have just made things worse.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frown and today
we have an episode that is right from the suggestion
(00:20):
boxes from the Twitter user Anti Purvis, who asked us
if we could please talk about the Emu War of um.
The reference that as one of the most bizarre wildlife
management stories I would like to just go ahead and
put out there. Yes, correct, that's that's completely accurate, um.
(00:40):
But it's also a story that needs a little bit
of context. Uh. Yeah. After World War One, there were
a lot of soldiers in Australia, both Australian and British,
and they moved to rural parts of the country as
part of a rural settlement effort described as a state scheme.
This is in quotes a state scheme intended to turn
swords into plowshares by Murray Johnson in the Journal of
(01:03):
Australian Studies. So the government purchased about ninety thousand hectares
of land. Uh, and much of it was not actually
very good for farmland. There's there's a lot of land
in Australia but a lot of it does not work
for quote, conventional farming very well, and that puts a
high demand on the parts that are going to be
the best for farming. So a lot of the soldiers
(01:25):
wound up in more of the marginal areas that weren't
actually that great for farming. So they were already set
up to have some challenges in their farming work. And
in particular in the Campion while Ghulan district, which is
northeast of Perth in Western Australia, the population was largely
soldier settlers, many of whom were growing wheat, and about
(01:46):
five thousand of them were trying their hand at agricultural
work as part of soldier settlement. Many hedge their bets
using their land for mixed farming, like they would try
to grow wheat and produce wool at the same time,
and when the price of one commodity went down sometimes
they could make up the difference with the other thing
that they were working on. So in spite of the
fact that this a lot of this was not really
(02:07):
prime farmland, through the nineteen twittings, things had gone pretty well.
They'd had several good seasons in a row, but by
the time the thirties rolled around, things started to go
south a little bit. They were becoming a little strained.
Commodity prices were dropping, droughts had become really common. There
was a lot of problems, a lot of problems with
(02:28):
rabbit infestation, and even when things had been better, sometimes
there had already been problems with really hard frosts and
the rabbits. We will talk about the rabbits again in
a future episode, because there's a whole other story there.
And then, of course the Great Depression happened UH, and
the value for many of Australia's goods was really dropping
(02:49):
and the deficit was out of control. In a hurry,
the Australian government, which was under Prime Minister James Schooling
at the time, used the country's wheat farming as an
attempt to prevent the financial dis aster that was falling
upon all of them UH. And under the Grow More
Wheat campaign, the government had actually promised a price of
four shillings per bushel for wheat. The idea was that
(03:11):
the government could use wheat to offset the collapsing price
of other goods, and people were really tempted by this
idea of four shillings a bushel. Getting a guaranteed price
for something was great and unexpected. It was a better
price than they could really expect other places. But unfortunately,
after this deal had been promoted to everyone, the price
(03:34):
of wheat started collapsing too. And the price of wheat
had already declined just tremendously when the Wheat Marketing Bill,
which would have actually gotten the money that had been
promised to the farmers, was voted down in the Senate
on July. So people had been expecting that they could
grow all this wheat sell it guaranteed four shillings a bushel,
(03:55):
and then they funding essentially fell through when the bill
was voted down. It was a hugely important bill, especially
in Western Australia where these particular farmers were living. It
was so important that there were talks of Western Australian
secession from the rest of Australia as the debate was
going on. One of the people making this sort of
(04:16):
threat was Mr H. Gregory of West Australia in the
House of Representatives, who said that Western Australia was going
to have way more difficulty than any other Australian state
if the farmers didn't get their money for their wheat.
There were other initiatives attempted to try to make good
on the promise, either by Australia or by the individual states,
but they just could not get off the ground. Another
(04:38):
bill to pay three shillings per usual was passed, but
by then the situation was so dire and the country
was having so many fiscal issues that they didn't have
the money to actually pay it. It was just words
that the price of wheat kept falling during the depression. Uh,
the farmers were becoming angrier and angrier and more frustrated
because they were waiting for this higher price that the
(05:00):
government had promised them while watching the market price fall,
so they were losing the ability to cut their losses
the longer they waited on the government to pay them.
At one point, they got so frustrated that they even
stopped loading their grain in an attempt to force the
government to pay up. It was sort of effectively the
same thing as going on strike, but that didn't work,
(05:22):
and finally the Wheat Bounty Act was passed on November
and that paid four and a halfpence per bushel on
all wheat marketed in two and other relief measures did follow.
These measures unfortunately did not offer that much actual relief um.
It's a little hard to compare because Australian money was
(05:44):
not on the decimal system at the time. Now Australian
money is on the dollar, but there are twenty shillings
in a pound and two forty pence in a pound,
so to drop from four shillings to four and a
halfpence per bushel is incredible. That's a pretty significant it
um tank at. So that's the context. You have all
(06:04):
of these farmers who have been farming all of this wheat.
They're desperate to be able to sell their wheat for something.
All the government's efforts to be able to pay them
money have pretty much fallen through. They're they're now sort
of scraping together this tiny, tiny amount perbicial. This is
what's going on when just before the ninety two wheat
harvest the EMUs came. So a little bit of background
(06:28):
in case you don't know what an email is, which
I found out some people I know who are smart
did not, so, so so that's where we're spelling this out.
That's surprising because we actually have EMUs in Georgia that
are places. It's apparently a very hospitable environment for them.
So it's a large ostrich like flightless bird that's native
to Australia. It's about one and a half meters, which
(06:49):
is five feet tall and a hundred pounds, so a
big flightless bird. UH. Some of some species have been
exterminated by settlers in our extinct ext The ones that
are left can run really fast, they kick when they're cornered,
and they liked to eat fruit, insects and wheat. It
turns out UM they generally migrate kind of westward out
(07:12):
of drier areas and towards the coast after their breeding
season rabbit fruit Rabbit proof fences that are in parts
of Australia that were built between nine one and nineteen
o seven keep them away from much of the coast.
But it runs sort of north south and even though
they're migrating westward, they're also going northwards, so they're pretty
much running the same direction as the fences going. So
(07:34):
there's not a lot of protection offered with this fence. UM.
It also turns out that they're wiley, which people were
not expecting when they concocted this plan. Uh. Evens had
been protected under the Game Act of eighteen seventy four,
but in night new legislation which went into effect in
two actually listed them as vermin because of their really
(07:57):
devastating effect on wheat farms. Twenty thousand giant kicking running
bird vermin descended upon the wheat farms. Uh. It was
not good for anyone. Uh. They were making their way
through farms around Campion and while Ghulin, which are east
(08:18):
and northeast of Perth, as we said before, UH, causing
huge damage to the wheat farms. And some of the
soldier settlers were like, we remember a very effective weapon
from World War One, and we're gonna go ask if
we can get help. So they went to Sir George Pierce,
who was the Minister of Defense, and said, we would
like the military's help with this EMU problem. That can
(08:41):
we have some machine guns league which we laugh, but
it's like, uh, it's just one of those things that
seems so extreme it's almost hard to process. And I
want to fight a bird, let me get some heavy artillery.
(09:04):
But it really was that dire at that point. It
was people were really desperately seeking help. At this point.
Um Pierce agreed that he was going to send some soldiers.
There were some conditions though. Local defense personnel not civilians,
had to be there to man the machine guns. There
had to be a commanding officer present, The State of
(09:25):
Western Australia would have to pay for the troop transport,
and the soldier settlers would have to provide the housing
and the AMMO and the food for the troops. He
did all of this without informing the Military Board. Colonel
Hoade of the first Cavalry Division in Sydney had also
requested on skins with the hope of using feathers for
his light horseman's hat. So the troops really like they
(09:47):
felt like they had put a plan together that was
gonna work. Yes, they thought success was imminent, yes and inevitable.
They were going to just be able to slaughter e moves,
retrieve their skins everybody. Major GPW. Meredith was the commander
of the seventh Heavy Battery and he was in charge
of this event. Also to quote Murray Johnson who we
(10:11):
referenced earlier, Sergeant McMurray and Gunner O'Halloran and their equipment
consisting of two Lewis machine guns and ten thousand rounds
of ammunition. Their task force was also joined by a
Fox movie tone cinematographer to record the forthcoming campaign, which
suggests that someone in authority, possibly Pierce, saw direct military
(10:32):
activity in the Wheatlands as useful government propaganda. So we've
got the major, the sergeant, the gunner, and the movie
team coming to Western Australia. They were in Western Australia already,
but coming to this part of Western Australia to kill
Imus in filment? How could this go anyway than success? Uh?
(10:54):
Just for context. The Lewis machine gun is a light
machine gun. It was invented by U. S. Colonel Isaac
Newton Lewis and it was used extensively by the British
Empire in World War One. It has a flat pan
magazine on top instead of a belt feed as you
might imagine. You can actually look up YouTube videos of
this and see what we're talking about. It's kind of
fascinating the way it feeds through. It's a big flat
(11:15):
pan of ammunition that sits on top. Yeah, where the
MMO is actually loaded into the pan, almost like the
rays of the sun if you were drawing like a
childish drawing of the sun, and then you flip it
onto the the machine gun and it feeds from that
pan rather than we've all seen in films like those
long the belt feed. But it doesn't work like that now.
(11:36):
This team arrived in early October, but just after they
got there a rainstorm drove all the EMUs out of
the fields. Were long enough that they said, okay, this
is actually we're not We're not worth waiting around here.
We're going to go home. Um. When the EMUs came back.
About a month later, Merritt, Major Meredith and his team
came back as well, and they arrived at the fields
(11:56):
near Campion on November two at about the time at
about the same time time as I heard of about
fifty EMUs. Uh. The problem was that the EMUs were
out of range of the machine guns, and some soldiers
tried to come and heard the EMUs towards the guns,
which was not all that effective. They finally did manage
to strike a few birds as they were fleeing for
(12:16):
the cover of nearby trees. And they actually made a
base camp on the land of a man named Joseph Joyce,
and they did recon on the surrounding farms for EMU activity. UH.
They managed to take out about a dozen birds before
deciding to change their tactics from seek out and shoot
to set ambushes near water sources. Right. The ambush strategy
(12:39):
was a little more successful than the seek and shoot strategy,
but but not really by much. November three passed without
any kind of incident. On November four, about a thousand
EMUs came out of the trees and approached the ambush directly.
The ambush was set on the walls of a dam,
and the machine gunners opened fire and hit a few
(13:00):
birds before the machine gun jammed. The settlers who were
assisting with this operation open fire with their rifles, but
by that point the birds were scattering and running for
the tree line. They waited for the rest of the
day for the birds to come back to this watering hole.
When they didn't come back, uh, if everybody started to
get the idea that maybe these EMUs were a little
(13:20):
smarter than they had thought. Yeah, they didn't count on
them using the logic of that thing is dangerous, I
will stay away from it. Lets uh. And so they
moved their operations south and they tried to mount a
Lewis machine gun onto a truck so that they could
fire while driving and hit EMUs that were on the move,
but the EMUs outran them and escaped into the trees,
(13:41):
and the gunner found the ride so rough that he
really wasn't able to fire the machine gun anyway. Now Elsewhere,
on the same day, a truck ran down an EMU
hit it, ran out of control and destroyed a long
length of fence. So the battle against the EMUs was
not really going very well anywhere that day. By the
eighth of November Major Meredith's Meredith's team had used about
(14:04):
a quarter of their ammunition, which was about rounds, and
with that they had killed two uh Meredith later called
it three hundred, and the soldier settlers rounded it up
to five hundred, maybe to raise their spirits. They were
the ones paying for the ammo, so the idea that
such a tiny proportion of AMMO was actually killing EMUs
(14:26):
was a little distressing when they were the ones paying
for the bullets. And then on November nine, yes, we're
actually got to parliament about what was going on. When
parliament Member Harold Thornby actually asked Prime Minister Lions about
the farce that was going on in Western Australia. That
same day, the Secretary of Defense sent a telegram ordering
the operation to end. Yes, this is an example of
(14:48):
we would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Did not
work out because, having not asked for permission, they were
ordered to return home. It was not as the scessful
attempt well, and it most likely actually made things worse,
since the fleeing EMUs than not only had they been
eating week, but now they were trampling crops. So the
(15:10):
soldier settlers, though, continued to ask for aid, and Meredith's
reports spoke of the extensive damage that the emu's had done.
He also explained as best as he could why he
had used so much ammo on so few birds, And
these are his words. It must be realized that an
emu full out can do forty five. Consequently, the target is,
(15:31):
after the first burst, a very rapidly moving one, and
is only visible for a very short time. Moreover, the
emu is an amazingly hard bird to kill outright, and
many mortal. Many carry mortal wounds up to the distance
of half a mile on actual observation. UH. Much later
in this campaign, a farmer named A. E. Johnson killed
(15:52):
an emu with his truck and that bird had five
bullets in his body which appeared to have been from
the first onslaught. So this EMU was still alive days
after being shot with multiple rounds. Yeah, it had survived
and was just carrying around metal while it ran about
its business People in the government appeared to try to
distance themselves from the idea of a second campaign. Uh
(16:15):
and the Minister of Defense finally said that no military
personnel could be placed there, but that the state government
could have equipment if it found its own qualified operators.
So they didn't want to waste man hours, but they
were willing to offer them the materials needed to continue
trying to fight the EMUs on their own, but there
were no experience machine gunners in the civil service list,
(16:38):
so it was back to Meredith and team, who were
being lampooned as Major Meredith and his married men. They
came back to the area and launched a second offensive
on November, and they used Joseph Joyce's property as their
starting point again. They killed about EMUs on November and
about the twenty about twenty more the day after. At
(16:59):
about this time, I'm an animal welfare officer was sent
to oversee the reports that so many birds were apparently
being injured and then continuing to run. It's not likely
that he was able to do that much. So he
was basically there to try to ensure that the animals
weren't suffering, that they were being hit and killed and
not needlessly carrying on in an inhumane way. Right that
(17:22):
that was That was his role, but it's unlikely that
it actually made much of an effect. By November fifteen,
the birds had started to become release cautious of the
soldiers activities, which I think people weren't quite expecting them
to learn from experience. Um, they would stay out of
range of the machine gun, so they were smarter than
(17:44):
people thought they were. They were learning range distance and
where was safe and where wasn't. They had boundaries in
their head of how close they could get. The team
moved around the area as various farmers would report to
them that they had seen EMUs and had crop damage,
and by December two they were pretty consistently killing uh
(18:05):
by reports about a hundred eves a week. That's what
they were telling people. Brigadier Martin recalled Major Meredith on
December ten. In Martin's reports, he gave an estimated nine
hundred and eighty six birds killed and nine thousand, eight
hundred sixty bullets used. That's the suspicious accounting of birds
versus bullets, and that is just multiplying by ten. Yes,
(18:28):
there was an ongoing attempt to get the soldier settlers
to repay the military for that that ammunition. The way
that it went down is that the Agricultural Bank reimbursed
the military on the soldier's behalf, and then the bank
put off asking the soldiers to repay them until nineteen
thirty three because they know times are hard for everybody. Eventually,
(18:50):
Te Dixon, who was the president of the Wheat Growers
Union at Campion, got a demand for thirty five pounds,
and Daniel O'Leary, who was an executive member of the
while Gulan Wheat Growers Union, got a demand for twenty
four pounds. O Larry eventually got his payment reduced, though
to one pound fourteen shillings. He didn't want to pay
(19:11):
anything encountered with an accounting of how much money he
had spent personally on the effort, including nine pounds for
victualling his Majesty's troops, ten pounds for transport with a
further five pounds for damage to same and nine hundred
pounds for the loss of six thousand bushels of wheat
valued at three shillings per bushel. The whole thing remained suspended,
(19:31):
and many sources don't show that anybody ever actually got paid,
that no money changed hands for reimbursement. Now, even though
this is pretty roundly seen as an unsuccessful attempt to
curb the population of e news, Western Australians continued to
ask for military help again in eight and nineteen forty three.
(19:53):
The military turned down the request all three times. The
soldier settlers used their own arms to fight the EMUs instead.
O Leary, who we mentioned a few minutes ago in
nineteen forty three also mentioned getting an RSPC a letter
about uh their destruction of the EMUs and how it
was cruel. His response was that they were going to
(20:14):
defend their crops and they did not need anyone's permission,
and after World War Two, farmers were actually issued free
immunition for dealing with vermon. Two hundred and eighty four thousand,
seven hundred four EMUs were known to have been killed
by farmers between ninety and nineteen sixty so in just
fifteen years time, right, So it seems like while the
(20:37):
firing of machine guns at herds of EMUs not very
successful as an attempt to control their population, people have
been able to do a little better with a rifle
sort of singling out one at a time. There are
still lots and lots of EMUs in Australia. Their population
now is controlled by a bounty. There are payments given
(21:00):
for between five thousand and forty thousand birds a year
in Western Australia. Even though there are that many being shot, reportedly,
their population are still pretty healthy. It's sort of like
the idea of if if the bird is really being
a pest and it's not negatively affecting their overall population
to the point of threatening them to be able to
(21:21):
keep them out of farmlands, then generally people seem to
be okay with this situation. Yeah, it's always you know,
as a compassionate human being, it's always hard to think
about animals being killed. But this is one of those
cases where the government is really trying to balance the
health of the animal population and the welfare of the
(21:45):
human population, and it's tricky. There's no easy answer really,
that's going to make everybody happy. So that's where they've
landed is with bounty, so that that one attempt they
fought a battle. They fought a battle. And at the
time things were they were obviously things were hard in
the Great Depression. People really took the opportunity to to
(22:07):
lampoon the military and the government when that was going on.
It became a source of entertainment for people, which people
kind of needed then, and it was it was nice
for people to have a government target that they could
laugh at when people felt like the government was taking
a lot of blame for what was going on in
the community at the time. So that's the story of
(22:29):
the Emy War, the brief and indeed bizarre wildlife management
attempt in Western Australia. I also have listener mails in
her room. This gets an a lord. I think as
as one of the greatest listener mails that we've gotten.
(22:50):
It is so awesome that you instant messaged me the
minute at our ind box and tell me how great
it was. I think they're leading. So this is from Megan.
Megan says, I don't know who's spearheading the recent spate
of medieval themed podcasts, but it's awesome. In college, part
of my senior thesis focused on anchors is I almost
fell over when I heard you mentioned them in the
(23:10):
Marjorie Camp episode. This year, at Valentine's Day, a friend
and I spent an inordinate amount of time coming up
with Valentine's that anchorses might send to their friends. A sampling.
Roses are red, violets are blue, the wall has a hole,
please pass my lunch through. And roses are red, violets
(23:31):
are blue. Too bad. I'm an anchoress, and I'm dead
to you. I think I'll be working in the greedy
car business in no time. I love them. I love
them so much. They just made me giggle and giggle
the second I saw them. Thank you so much for
sending those, Megan h And I kind of want to
hang them above my desk. I find them to be great.
(23:54):
I also want to pass on a correction, in case
you missed it earlier. In that Marjorie episode, I referred
to the Tomb of St. Peter as being in uh
in Santiago. It is not. It is the Tomb of St. James.
I said that all wrong, So so we have so
many tombs. If them in your head, I just the wrong,
(24:17):
completely wrong word just came right out of my mouth.
It seems St. Peter is not where I say it was.
If you would like to learn more about this, if
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us about, if you would like to send us a note,
you can email us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history
(24:37):
class stuff, and on Twitter at missed in History. We
also just started a tumbler. It's at missed in History
dot tumbler dot com, and we have a pen board
on Pinterest. We are everywhere. If you would like to
learn more about the instrument of destruction that did not
destroy nearly as many EMUs as people hoped it would,
you can go to our website. Put the word machine
(24:58):
gun in the search bar and you will find how
machine guns work. You can do all that and a
whole lot more at our site, which is how stuff
Works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frown and today
we have an episode that is right from the suggestion
(00:20):
boxes from the Twitter user Anti Purvis, who asked us
if we could please talk about the Emu War of um.
The reference that as one of the most bizarre wildlife
management stories I would like to just go ahead and
put out there. Yes, correct, that's that's completely accurate, um.
(00:40):
But it's also a story that needs a little bit
of context. Uh. Yeah. After World War One, there were
a lot of soldiers in Australia, both Australian and British,
and they moved to rural parts of the country as
part of a rural settlement effort described as a state scheme.
This is in quotes a state scheme intended to turn
swords into plowshares by Murray Johnson in the Journal of
(01:03):
Australian Studies. So the government purchased about ninety thousand hectares
of land. Uh, and much of it was not actually
very good for farmland. There's there's a lot of land
in Australia but a lot of it does not work
for quote, conventional farming very well, and that puts a
high demand on the parts that are going to be
the best for farming. So a lot of the soldiers
(01:25):
wound up in more of the marginal areas that weren't
actually that great for farming. So they were already set
up to have some challenges in their farming work. And
in particular in the Campion while Ghulan district, which is
northeast of Perth in Western Australia, the population was largely
soldier settlers, many of whom were growing wheat, and about
(01:46):
five thousand of them were trying their hand at agricultural
work as part of soldier settlement. Many hedge their bets
using their land for mixed farming, like they would try
to grow wheat and produce wool at the same time,
and when the price of one commodity went down sometimes
they could make up the difference with the other thing
that they were working on. So in spite of the
fact that this a lot of this was not really
(02:07):
prime farmland, through the nineteen twittings, things had gone pretty well.
They'd had several good seasons in a row, but by
the time the thirties rolled around, things started to go
south a little bit. They were becoming a little strained.
Commodity prices were dropping, droughts had become really common. There
was a lot of problems, a lot of problems with
(02:28):
rabbit infestation, and even when things had been better, sometimes
there had already been problems with really hard frosts and
the rabbits. We will talk about the rabbits again in
a future episode, because there's a whole other story there.
And then, of course the Great Depression happened UH, and
the value for many of Australia's goods was really dropping
(02:49):
and the deficit was out of control. In a hurry,
the Australian government, which was under Prime Minister James Schooling
at the time, used the country's wheat farming as an
attempt to prevent the financial dis aster that was falling
upon all of them UH. And under the Grow More
Wheat campaign, the government had actually promised a price of
four shillings per bushel for wheat. The idea was that
(03:11):
the government could use wheat to offset the collapsing price
of other goods, and people were really tempted by this
idea of four shillings a bushel. Getting a guaranteed price
for something was great and unexpected. It was a better
price than they could really expect other places. But unfortunately,
after this deal had been promoted to everyone, the price
(03:34):
of wheat started collapsing too. And the price of wheat
had already declined just tremendously when the Wheat Marketing Bill,
which would have actually gotten the money that had been
promised to the farmers, was voted down in the Senate
on July. So people had been expecting that they could
grow all this wheat sell it guaranteed four shillings a bushel,
(03:55):
and then they funding essentially fell through when the bill
was voted down. It was a hugely important bill, especially
in Western Australia where these particular farmers were living. It
was so important that there were talks of Western Australian
secession from the rest of Australia as the debate was
going on. One of the people making this sort of
(04:16):
threat was Mr H. Gregory of West Australia in the
House of Representatives, who said that Western Australia was going
to have way more difficulty than any other Australian state
if the farmers didn't get their money for their wheat.
There were other initiatives attempted to try to make good
on the promise, either by Australia or by the individual states,
but they just could not get off the ground. Another
(04:38):
bill to pay three shillings per usual was passed, but
by then the situation was so dire and the country
was having so many fiscal issues that they didn't have
the money to actually pay it. It was just words
that the price of wheat kept falling during the depression. Uh,
the farmers were becoming angrier and angrier and more frustrated
because they were waiting for this higher price that the
(05:00):
government had promised them while watching the market price fall,
so they were losing the ability to cut their losses
the longer they waited on the government to pay them.
At one point, they got so frustrated that they even
stopped loading their grain in an attempt to force the
government to pay up. It was sort of effectively the
same thing as going on strike, but that didn't work,
(05:22):
and finally the Wheat Bounty Act was passed on November
and that paid four and a halfpence per bushel on
all wheat marketed in two and other relief measures did follow.
These measures unfortunately did not offer that much actual relief um.
It's a little hard to compare because Australian money was
(05:44):
not on the decimal system at the time. Now Australian
money is on the dollar, but there are twenty shillings
in a pound and two forty pence in a pound,
so to drop from four shillings to four and a
halfpence per bushel is incredible. That's a pretty significant it
um tank at. So that's the context. You have all
(06:04):
of these farmers who have been farming all of this wheat.
They're desperate to be able to sell their wheat for something.
All the government's efforts to be able to pay them
money have pretty much fallen through. They're they're now sort
of scraping together this tiny, tiny amount perbicial. This is
what's going on when just before the ninety two wheat
harvest the EMUs came. So a little bit of background
(06:28):
in case you don't know what an email is, which
I found out some people I know who are smart
did not, so, so so that's where we're spelling this out.
That's surprising because we actually have EMUs in Georgia that
are places. It's apparently a very hospitable environment for them.
So it's a large ostrich like flightless bird that's native
to Australia. It's about one and a half meters, which
(06:49):
is five feet tall and a hundred pounds, so a
big flightless bird. UH. Some of some species have been
exterminated by settlers in our extinct ext The ones that
are left can run really fast, they kick when they're cornered,
and they liked to eat fruit, insects and wheat. It
turns out UM they generally migrate kind of westward out
(07:12):
of drier areas and towards the coast after their breeding
season rabbit fruit Rabbit proof fences that are in parts
of Australia that were built between nine one and nineteen
o seven keep them away from much of the coast.
But it runs sort of north south and even though
they're migrating westward, they're also going northwards, so they're pretty
much running the same direction as the fences going. So
(07:34):
there's not a lot of protection offered with this fence. UM.
It also turns out that they're wiley, which people were
not expecting when they concocted this plan. Uh. Evens had
been protected under the Game Act of eighteen seventy four,
but in night new legislation which went into effect in
two actually listed them as vermin because of their really
(07:57):
devastating effect on wheat farms. Twenty thousand giant kicking running
bird vermin descended upon the wheat farms. Uh. It was
not good for anyone. Uh. They were making their way
through farms around Campion and while Ghulin, which are east
(08:18):
and northeast of Perth, as we said before, UH, causing
huge damage to the wheat farms. And some of the
soldier settlers were like, we remember a very effective weapon
from World War One, and we're gonna go ask if
we can get help. So they went to Sir George Pierce,
who was the Minister of Defense, and said, we would
like the military's help with this EMU problem. That can
(08:41):
we have some machine guns league which we laugh, but
it's like, uh, it's just one of those things that
seems so extreme it's almost hard to process. And I
want to fight a bird, let me get some heavy artillery.
(09:04):
But it really was that dire at that point. It
was people were really desperately seeking help. At this point.
Um Pierce agreed that he was going to send some soldiers.
There were some conditions though. Local defense personnel not civilians,
had to be there to man the machine guns. There
had to be a commanding officer present, The State of
(09:25):
Western Australia would have to pay for the troop transport,
and the soldier settlers would have to provide the housing
and the AMMO and the food for the troops. He
did all of this without informing the Military Board. Colonel
Hoade of the first Cavalry Division in Sydney had also
requested on skins with the hope of using feathers for
his light horseman's hat. So the troops really like they
(09:47):
felt like they had put a plan together that was
gonna work. Yes, they thought success was imminent, yes and inevitable.
They were going to just be able to slaughter e moves,
retrieve their skins everybody. Major GPW. Meredith was the commander
of the seventh Heavy Battery and he was in charge
of this event. Also to quote Murray Johnson who we
(10:11):
referenced earlier, Sergeant McMurray and Gunner O'Halloran and their equipment
consisting of two Lewis machine guns and ten thousand rounds
of ammunition. Their task force was also joined by a
Fox movie tone cinematographer to record the forthcoming campaign, which
suggests that someone in authority, possibly Pierce, saw direct military
(10:32):
activity in the Wheatlands as useful government propaganda. So we've
got the major, the sergeant, the gunner, and the movie
team coming to Western Australia. They were in Western Australia already,
but coming to this part of Western Australia to kill
Imus in filment? How could this go anyway than success? Uh?
(10:54):
Just for context. The Lewis machine gun is a light
machine gun. It was invented by U. S. Colonel Isaac
Newton Lewis and it was used extensively by the British
Empire in World War One. It has a flat pan
magazine on top instead of a belt feed as you
might imagine. You can actually look up YouTube videos of
this and see what we're talking about. It's kind of
fascinating the way it feeds through. It's a big flat
(11:15):
pan of ammunition that sits on top. Yeah, where the
MMO is actually loaded into the pan, almost like the
rays of the sun if you were drawing like a
childish drawing of the sun, and then you flip it
onto the the machine gun and it feeds from that
pan rather than we've all seen in films like those
long the belt feed. But it doesn't work like that now.
(11:36):
This team arrived in early October, but just after they
got there a rainstorm drove all the EMUs out of
the fields. Were long enough that they said, okay, this
is actually we're not We're not worth waiting around here.
We're going to go home. Um. When the EMUs came back.
About a month later, Merritt, Major Meredith and his team
came back as well, and they arrived at the fields
(11:56):
near Campion on November two at about the time at
about the same time time as I heard of about
fifty EMUs. Uh. The problem was that the EMUs were
out of range of the machine guns, and some soldiers
tried to come and heard the EMUs towards the guns,
which was not all that effective. They finally did manage
to strike a few birds as they were fleeing for
(12:16):
the cover of nearby trees. And they actually made a
base camp on the land of a man named Joseph Joyce,
and they did recon on the surrounding farms for EMU activity. UH.
They managed to take out about a dozen birds before
deciding to change their tactics from seek out and shoot
to set ambushes near water sources. Right. The ambush strategy
(12:39):
was a little more successful than the seek and shoot strategy,
but but not really by much. November three passed without
any kind of incident. On November four, about a thousand
EMUs came out of the trees and approached the ambush directly.
The ambush was set on the walls of a dam,
and the machine gunners opened fire and hit a few
(13:00):
birds before the machine gun jammed. The settlers who were
assisting with this operation open fire with their rifles, but
by that point the birds were scattering and running for
the tree line. They waited for the rest of the
day for the birds to come back to this watering hole.
When they didn't come back, uh, if everybody started to
get the idea that maybe these EMUs were a little
(13:20):
smarter than they had thought. Yeah, they didn't count on
them using the logic of that thing is dangerous, I
will stay away from it. Lets uh. And so they
moved their operations south and they tried to mount a
Lewis machine gun onto a truck so that they could
fire while driving and hit EMUs that were on the move,
but the EMUs outran them and escaped into the trees,
(13:41):
and the gunner found the ride so rough that he
really wasn't able to fire the machine gun anyway. Now Elsewhere,
on the same day, a truck ran down an EMU
hit it, ran out of control and destroyed a long
length of fence. So the battle against the EMUs was
not really going very well anywhere that day. By the
eighth of November Major Meredith's Meredith's team had used about
(14:04):
a quarter of their ammunition, which was about rounds, and
with that they had killed two uh Meredith later called
it three hundred, and the soldier settlers rounded it up
to five hundred, maybe to raise their spirits. They were
the ones paying for the ammo, so the idea that
such a tiny proportion of AMMO was actually killing EMUs
(14:26):
was a little distressing when they were the ones paying
for the bullets. And then on November nine, yes, we're
actually got to parliament about what was going on. When
parliament Member Harold Thornby actually asked Prime Minister Lions about
the farce that was going on in Western Australia. That
same day, the Secretary of Defense sent a telegram ordering
the operation to end. Yes, this is an example of
(14:48):
we would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Did not
work out because, having not asked for permission, they were
ordered to return home. It was not as the scessful
attempt well, and it most likely actually made things worse,
since the fleeing EMUs than not only had they been
eating week, but now they were trampling crops. So the
(15:10):
soldier settlers, though, continued to ask for aid, and Meredith's
reports spoke of the extensive damage that the emu's had done.
He also explained as best as he could why he
had used so much ammo on so few birds, And
these are his words. It must be realized that an
emu full out can do forty five. Consequently, the target is,
(15:31):
after the first burst, a very rapidly moving one, and
is only visible for a very short time. Moreover, the
emu is an amazingly hard bird to kill outright, and
many mortal. Many carry mortal wounds up to the distance
of half a mile on actual observation. UH. Much later
in this campaign, a farmer named A. E. Johnson killed
(15:52):
an emu with his truck and that bird had five
bullets in his body which appeared to have been from
the first onslaught. So this EMU was still alive days
after being shot with multiple rounds. Yeah, it had survived
and was just carrying around metal while it ran about
its business People in the government appeared to try to
distance themselves from the idea of a second campaign. Uh
(16:15):
and the Minister of Defense finally said that no military
personnel could be placed there, but that the state government
could have equipment if it found its own qualified operators.
So they didn't want to waste man hours, but they
were willing to offer them the materials needed to continue
trying to fight the EMUs on their own, but there
were no experience machine gunners in the civil service list,
(16:38):
so it was back to Meredith and team, who were
being lampooned as Major Meredith and his married men. They
came back to the area and launched a second offensive
on November, and they used Joseph Joyce's property as their
starting point again. They killed about EMUs on November and
about the twenty about twenty more the day after. At
(16:59):
about this time, I'm an animal welfare officer was sent
to oversee the reports that so many birds were apparently
being injured and then continuing to run. It's not likely
that he was able to do that much. So he
was basically there to try to ensure that the animals
weren't suffering, that they were being hit and killed and
not needlessly carrying on in an inhumane way. Right that
(17:22):
that was That was his role, but it's unlikely that
it actually made much of an effect. By November fifteen,
the birds had started to become release cautious of the
soldiers activities, which I think people weren't quite expecting them
to learn from experience. Um, they would stay out of
range of the machine gun, so they were smarter than
(17:44):
people thought they were. They were learning range distance and
where was safe and where wasn't. They had boundaries in
their head of how close they could get. The team
moved around the area as various farmers would report to
them that they had seen EMUs and had crop damage,
and by December two they were pretty consistently killing uh
(18:05):
by reports about a hundred eves a week. That's what
they were telling people. Brigadier Martin recalled Major Meredith on
December ten. In Martin's reports, he gave an estimated nine
hundred and eighty six birds killed and nine thousand, eight
hundred sixty bullets used. That's the suspicious accounting of birds
versus bullets, and that is just multiplying by ten. Yes,
(18:28):
there was an ongoing attempt to get the soldier settlers
to repay the military for that that ammunition. The way
that it went down is that the Agricultural Bank reimbursed
the military on the soldier's behalf, and then the bank
put off asking the soldiers to repay them until nineteen
thirty three because they know times are hard for everybody. Eventually,
(18:50):
Te Dixon, who was the president of the Wheat Growers
Union at Campion, got a demand for thirty five pounds,
and Daniel O'Leary, who was an executive member of the
while Gulan Wheat Growers Union, got a demand for twenty
four pounds. O Larry eventually got his payment reduced, though
to one pound fourteen shillings. He didn't want to pay
(19:11):
anything encountered with an accounting of how much money he
had spent personally on the effort, including nine pounds for
victualling his Majesty's troops, ten pounds for transport with a
further five pounds for damage to same and nine hundred
pounds for the loss of six thousand bushels of wheat
valued at three shillings per bushel. The whole thing remained suspended,
(19:31):
and many sources don't show that anybody ever actually got paid,
that no money changed hands for reimbursement. Now, even though
this is pretty roundly seen as an unsuccessful attempt to
curb the population of e news, Western Australians continued to
ask for military help again in eight and nineteen forty three.
(19:53):
The military turned down the request all three times. The
soldier settlers used their own arms to fight the EMUs instead.
O Leary, who we mentioned a few minutes ago in
nineteen forty three also mentioned getting an RSPC a letter
about uh their destruction of the EMUs and how it
was cruel. His response was that they were going to
(20:14):
defend their crops and they did not need anyone's permission,
and after World War Two, farmers were actually issued free
immunition for dealing with vermon. Two hundred and eighty four thousand,
seven hundred four EMUs were known to have been killed
by farmers between ninety and nineteen sixty so in just
fifteen years time, right, So it seems like while the
(20:37):
firing of machine guns at herds of EMUs not very
successful as an attempt to control their population, people have
been able to do a little better with a rifle
sort of singling out one at a time. There are
still lots and lots of EMUs in Australia. Their population
now is controlled by a bounty. There are payments given
(21:00):
for between five thousand and forty thousand birds a year
in Western Australia. Even though there are that many being shot, reportedly,
their population are still pretty healthy. It's sort of like
the idea of if if the bird is really being
a pest and it's not negatively affecting their overall population
to the point of threatening them to be able to
(21:21):
keep them out of farmlands, then generally people seem to
be okay with this situation. Yeah, it's always you know,
as a compassionate human being, it's always hard to think
about animals being killed. But this is one of those
cases where the government is really trying to balance the
health of the animal population and the welfare of the
(21:45):
human population, and it's tricky. There's no easy answer really,
that's going to make everybody happy. So that's where they've
landed is with bounty, so that that one attempt they
fought a battle. They fought a battle. And at the
time things were they were obviously things were hard in
the Great Depression. People really took the opportunity to to
(22:07):
lampoon the military and the government when that was going on.
It became a source of entertainment for people, which people
kind of needed then, and it was it was nice
for people to have a government target that they could
laugh at when people felt like the government was taking
a lot of blame for what was going on in
the community at the time. So that's the story of
(22:29):
the Emy War, the brief and indeed bizarre wildlife management
attempt in Western Australia. I also have listener mails in
her room. This gets an a lord. I think as
as one of the greatest listener mails that we've gotten.
(22:50):
It is so awesome that you instant messaged me the
minute at our ind box and tell me how great
it was. I think they're leading. So this is from Megan.
Megan says, I don't know who's spearheading the recent spate
of medieval themed podcasts, but it's awesome. In college, part
of my senior thesis focused on anchors is I almost
fell over when I heard you mentioned them in the
(23:10):
Marjorie Camp episode. This year, at Valentine's Day, a friend
and I spent an inordinate amount of time coming up
with Valentine's that anchorses might send to their friends. A sampling.
Roses are red, violets are blue, the wall has a hole,
please pass my lunch through. And roses are red, violets
(23:31):
are blue. Too bad. I'm an anchoress, and I'm dead
to you. I think I'll be working in the greedy
car business in no time. I love them. I love
them so much. They just made me giggle and giggle
the second I saw them. Thank you so much for
sending those, Megan h And I kind of want to
hang them above my desk. I find them to be great.
(23:54):
I also want to pass on a correction, in case
you missed it earlier. In that Marjorie episode, I referred
to the Tomb of St. Peter as being in uh
in Santiago. It is not. It is the Tomb of St. James.
I said that all wrong, So so we have so
many tombs. If them in your head, I just the wrong,
(24:17):
completely wrong word just came right out of my mouth.
It seems St. Peter is not where I say it was.
If you would like to learn more about this, if
you have things that you would like to talk to
us about, if you would like to send us a note,
you can email us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash history
(24:37):
class stuff, and on Twitter at missed in History. We
also just started a tumbler. It's at missed in History
dot tumbler dot com, and we have a pen board
on Pinterest. We are everywhere. If you would like to
learn more about the instrument of destruction that did not
destroy nearly as many EMUs as people hoped it would,
you can go to our website. Put the word machine
(24:58):
gun in the search bar and you will find how
machine guns work. You can do all that and a
whole lot more at our site, which is how stuff
Works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. M
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