September 2, 2017 • 24 mins
We're revisiting the story of large numbers of emus making their way through Australia, severely damaging wheat farms. The military tried to help, but may have just made things worse.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, it's time for another Saturday classic where we dig
into the back catalog and we re share an older episode.
Uh and today that episode is the Emu War. This
is one of the topics that we continue to get
requests for and while it's nice to be able to
answer those emails with a wish that is already granted,
when we send the u r L of that existing episode,
we thought we would spread the news far and wide
(00:23):
that yes, there is an episode about the Emu war.
I will also say that we know that in Australia
people say emu as highy just did. However, in the
United States many people say emu as I just did. Yeah.
We got a lot of email about this fact when
this episode originally came out. Yeah, so just enjoy the
(00:43):
birds and don't get too worried about how we pronounce it.
We know both are acceptable in different places. And this
war and I have to use the air quotes was
an initiative in Australia in the nineteen thirties to control
the emu population. There were soldiers and guns and hunting.
It was a big adventure, but ultimately it was a
really embarrassing affair. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:09):
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 boxes from the Twitter user
(01:30):
Anti Purvis, who asked us if we could please talk
about the Emu War of UM referenced that as one
of the most bizarre wildlife management stories. I would like
to just go ahead and put it out there. Yes, correct,
that's that's completely accurate. Um. It's also a story that
needs a little bit of context. H. Yeah. After World
(01:53):
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 quotes a state
scheme intended to turn swords into plowshares by Murray Johnson
in the Journal of Australian Studies. So the government purchased
(02:13):
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 they
are going to be the best for farming. So a
lot of the soldiers wound up in more of the
marginal areas that weren't actually that great for farming. So
(02:37):
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 five thousand of them were trying
their hand at agricultural work. As part of soldier settlement.
(02:58):
Many hedge their bed, 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 prime farmland, through the nineteen twenties
things had gone pretty well. They'd had several good seasons
(03:20):
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 rabbit infestation. And even when things
had been better, sometimes there had already been problems with
(03:41):
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 and the deficit was out of control.
In a hurry, the Australian government, which was under Prime
(04:01):
Minister James Schoolan at the time, used the country's wheat
farming as an attempt to prevent the financial disaster 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 the government could use wheat to offset the
collapsing price of other goods, and people were really tempted
(04:24):
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 of wheat started collapsing too, and the price
(04:44):
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. Ellett guaranteed four shillings
a bushel, and then the funding essentially fell through when
(05:06):
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 threat was Mr H. Gregory of West Australia and
(05:26):
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
bill to pay three shillings per bushal was passed, but
(05:48):
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
right that the price of wheat kept falling during the depression,
and uh the farmers were becoming angrier and angrier and
more frustrated because they were waiting for this higher price
that the government had promised them while watching the market
(06:10):
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, and finally the Wheat Bounty Act was passed
(06:32):
on November twenty five, n one, and that paid four
and a halfpence per bushell on all wheat marketed in
ninety 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 not
on the decimal system at the time. Now Australian money
(06:54):
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 um tank
at the point. So that's the context. You have all
of these farmers who have been farming all of this wheat.
They're desperate to be able to sell their wheat for something.
(07:18):
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 probusial. This is
what's going on when just before the wheat harvest the
EMUs came. So a little bit of background in case
you don't know what an EMU is, which I found
(07:38):
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 is five
ft tall and or a hundred pounds, a big flightless bird. Uh.
(08:02):
Some of some species have been exterminated by settlers in
our extinct extinct. The ones that are left can run
really fast, they kick when they're cornered, and they like
to eat fruit, insects and wait. It turns out UM
they generally migrate kind of westward out of drier areas
and towards the coast after their breeding season. Rabbit fruit
(08:25):
Rabbit proof fences that are in parts of Australia that
were built between nine one and nineteen 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 there's not a lot
of protection offered with this fence. UM. It also turns
(08:47):
out that they're wily, which people were not expecting when
they concocted this plan. Uh. Eves had been protected under
the Game Act of eighteen seventy four, but in new
legislation which went into effect, actually listed them as vermin
because of their really devastating effect on wheat farms. So
(09:09):
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 and northeast of Perth, as
we said before, UH, causing huge damage to the wheat farms.
(09:32):
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 we have some machine guns league
which we love. But it's like, uh, it's just one
(09:54):
of those things that seems so extreme. It's almost hard
to process. And I want to fight a b Let
me get some heavy artillery. But it really was that
dire at that point. It was people were really desperately
(10:17):
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 Western Australia would have to
pay for the troop transport, and the soldier settlers would
(10:37):
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 felt like they had put
a plan together that was gonna work. Yes, they thought
(10:58):
success was imminent, yes and inevitable. They were going to
just be able to slaughter e moves, retrieve their skins, everybody. Uh.
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 referenced earlier, Sergeant McMurray
(11:22):
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 activity in the Wheatlands as
(11:42):
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 EMUs in film it.
How could this go anyway than success? Uh? Just for context.
(12:03):
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. Yeah, it's a big flat pan of
(12:24):
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 that. But it doesn't work like that now.
This team arrived in early October, but just after they
(12:47):
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 Mary and his team
came back as well, and they arrived at the fields
near Campion on November two at about the time, at
about the same time as I heard of about fifty EMUs. Uh.
(13:11):
The problem was that the EMUs were out of range
of the machine guns, and some soldiers tried to come
and heard the EMUs toward the guns, which was not
all that effective. They finally did manage to strike a
few birds as they were fleeing for the cover of
nearby trees. And they actually made a base camp on
the land of a man named Joseph Joyce, and they
(13:33):
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 ambus strategy
was a little more successful than the seek and shoot strategy,
but but not really by much. November three passed without
(13:54):
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
birds before the machine gun jammed. The settlers who were
assisting with this operation open fire with their rifles, but
(14:14):
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
smarter than they had thought. Yeah, they didn't count on them,
using the logic of that thing is dangerous, I will
(14:35):
stay away from it. Let's not go there. 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, 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
(14:57):
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 a quarter of their ammunition, which
was about rounds, and with that they had killed two us. Uh.
(15:19):
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 was a little distressing when they were the
ones paying for the bullets. And then on November nine, yes,
(15:40):
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 we would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Did
not work out because, having not asked for permission, they
(16:04):
were ordered to return home. It was not a successful
attempt well, and it most likely actually made things worse,
since the fleeing EMUs than not only had they been
eating wheat, but now they were trampling crops. So the
soldier settlers, though, continued to ask for aid, and Meredith's
reports spoke of the extensive damage that the emu's had done.
(16:25):
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,
after the first burst, a very rapidly moving one and
is only visible for a very short time. Moreover, the
(16:46):
emu is an amazingly hard bird to kill outright, and
many mortal, many carrey 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 held
an EMU with its 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
(17:09):
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
and the Minister of Defense finally said that no military
personnel can be placed there, but that the state government
could have equipment if it found its own qualified operators.
(17:32):
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,
so it was back to Meredith and team, who were
being lampooned as Major Meredith and his married men. They
(17:52):
came back to the area and launched a second offensive
on November thirt and they used Joseph Joyce's property as
their starting point again. They killed about twenty five mus
on November thirte and about the twenty about twenty more
the day after. At about this time, an animal welfare
officer was sent to oversee the reports that so many
birds were apparently being injured and then continuing to run.
(18:16):
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 that was That was his role, but it's unlikely
that it actually made much of an effect. By November fifteen,
(18:37):
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
people thought they were. They were learning range distance and
where was safe and where wasn't. They had boundaries in
(18:59):
their head of how closely could get h 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
by reports about a hundred ems a week. That's what
they were telling people. Brigadier Martin recalled Major Meredith on
(19:27):
December ten. In Martin's reports, he gave an estimated nine
eighty six birds killed and nine thousand, eight hundred sixty
bullets used. That's a suspicious accounting of birds versus bullets,
and that is just multiplying by ten. Yes, there was
an ongoing attempt to get the soldier settlers to repay
(19:47):
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 thirty three because
they know times are hard for everybody. Eventually, T. E. Dixon,
who was the president of the Wheat Growers Union at Campion,
(20:09):
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
Learry eventually got his payment reduced, though to one pound
fourteen shillings. He didn't want to pay anything encountered with
an accounting of how much money he had spent personally
(20:30):
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, and many
sources don't show that anybody ever actually got paid, that
(20:51):
no money changed hands for reimbursement. Now, even though this
is pretty roundly seen as an unsuccessful attempt to curb
the population of EMUs, Western Australians continued to ask for
military help again in ninety four, nine thirty eight, and
nineteen forty three. The military turned down the request all
(21:12):
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 defend their crops and they did
not need anyone's permission, and after World War Two, farmers
(21:36):
were actually issued free ammunition for dealing with vermon Two
hundred and eighty four thousand, seven hundred four EMUs were
known to have been killed by farmers between nineteen forty
five and nineteen sixty so in just fifteen years time, right,
So it seems like while the firing of machine guns
at herds of EMUs not very successful as an attempt
(21:58):
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 for between five thousand
and forty thousand birds a year in Western Australia. Even
(22:21):
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 keep them
out of farmlands, then generally people seem to be okay
(22:42):
with the 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 human population,
and it's tricky. There's no easy answer really that's going
(23:04):
to make it everybody happy. So that's where they've landed
is with bounty. So that that one attempt N two
they fought a battle. They fought a battle, and at
the time things where they were obviously things were hard
in the Great Depression. People really took the opportunity to
to lampoon the military and the government when that was
(23:25):
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 the Emy War, the brief and indeed bizarre
(23:49):
wildlife management attempt in Western Australia. Hey, since these episodes
that were sharing our past class six, we have some
updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before.
If you want to email us, our email address is
History Podcast at house to works dot com and you
(24:10):
can find us across the spectrum of social media as
Missed in History. You can also find us at Missed
in history dot com, and you can visit our parent company,
howset Works at house to works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.
Hey, it's time for another Saturday classic where we dig
into the back catalog and we re share an older episode.
Uh and today that episode is the Emu War. This
is one of the topics that we continue to get
requests for and while it's nice to be able to
answer those emails with a wish that is already granted,
when we send the u r L of that existing episode,
we thought we would spread the news far and wide
(00:23):
that yes, there is an episode about the Emu war.
I will also say that we know that in Australia
people say emu as highy just did. However, in the
United States many people say emu as I just did. Yeah.
We got a lot of email about this fact when
this episode originally came out. Yeah, so just enjoy the
(00:43):
birds and don't get too worried about how we pronounce it.
We know both are acceptable in different places. And this
war and I have to use the air quotes was
an initiative in Australia in the nineteen thirties to control
the emu population. There were soldiers and guns and hunting.
It was a big adventure, but ultimately it was a
really embarrassing affair. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:09):
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 boxes from the Twitter user
(01:30):
Anti Purvis, who asked us if we could please talk
about the Emu War of UM referenced that as one
of the most bizarre wildlife management stories. I would like
to just go ahead and put it out there. Yes, correct,
that's that's completely accurate. Um. It's also a story that
needs a little bit of context. H. Yeah. After World
(01:53):
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 quotes a state
scheme intended to turn swords into plowshares by Murray Johnson
in the Journal of Australian Studies. So the government purchased
(02:13):
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 they
are going to be the best for farming. So a
lot of the soldiers wound up in more of the
marginal areas that weren't actually that great for farming. So
(02:37):
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 five thousand of them were trying
their hand at agricultural work. As part of soldier settlement.
(02:58):
Many hedge their bed, 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 prime farmland, through the nineteen twenties
things had gone pretty well. They'd had several good seasons
(03:20):
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 rabbit infestation. And even when things
had been better, sometimes there had already been problems with
(03:41):
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 and the deficit was out of control.
In a hurry, the Australian government, which was under Prime
(04:01):
Minister James Schoolan at the time, used the country's wheat
farming as an attempt to prevent the financial disaster 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 the government could use wheat to offset the
collapsing price of other goods, and people were really tempted
(04:24):
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 of wheat started collapsing too, and the price
(04:44):
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. Ellett guaranteed four shillings
a bushel, and then the funding essentially fell through when
(05:06):
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 threat was Mr H. Gregory of West Australia and
(05:26):
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
bill to pay three shillings per bushal was passed, but
(05:48):
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
right that the price of wheat kept falling during the depression,
and uh the farmers were becoming angrier and angrier and
more frustrated because they were waiting for this higher price
that the government had promised them while watching the market
(06:10):
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, and finally the Wheat Bounty Act was passed
(06:32):
on November twenty five, n one, and that paid four
and a halfpence per bushell on all wheat marketed in
ninety 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 not
on the decimal system at the time. Now Australian money
(06:54):
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 um tank
at the point. So that's the context. You have all
of these farmers who have been farming all of this wheat.
They're desperate to be able to sell their wheat for something.
(07:18):
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 probusial. This is
what's going on when just before the wheat harvest the
EMUs came. So a little bit of background in case
you don't know what an EMU is, which I found
(07:38):
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 is five
ft tall and or a hundred pounds, a big flightless bird. Uh.
(08:02):
Some of some species have been exterminated by settlers in
our extinct extinct. The ones that are left can run
really fast, they kick when they're cornered, and they like
to eat fruit, insects and wait. It turns out UM
they generally migrate kind of westward out of drier areas
and towards the coast after their breeding season. Rabbit fruit
(08:25):
Rabbit proof fences that are in parts of Australia that
were built between nine one and nineteen 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 there's not a lot
of protection offered with this fence. UM. It also turns
(08:47):
out that they're wily, which people were not expecting when
they concocted this plan. Uh. Eves had been protected under
the Game Act of eighteen seventy four, but in new
legislation which went into effect, actually listed them as vermin
because of their really devastating effect on wheat farms. So
(09:09):
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 and northeast of Perth, as
we said before, UH, causing huge damage to the wheat farms.
(09:32):
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 we have some machine guns league
which we love. But it's like, uh, it's just one
(09:54):
of those things that seems so extreme. It's almost hard
to process. And I want to fight a b Let
me get some heavy artillery. But it really was that
dire at that point. It was people were really desperately
(10:17):
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 Western Australia would have to
pay for the troop transport, and the soldier settlers would
(10:37):
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 felt like they had put
a plan together that was gonna work. Yes, they thought
(10:58):
success was imminent, yes and inevitable. They were going to
just be able to slaughter e moves, retrieve their skins, everybody. Uh.
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 referenced earlier, Sergeant McMurray
(11:22):
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 activity in the Wheatlands as
(11:42):
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 EMUs in film it.
How could this go anyway than success? Uh? Just for context.
(12:03):
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. Yeah, it's a big flat pan of
(12:24):
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 that. But it doesn't work like that now.
This team arrived in early October, but just after they
(12:47):
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 Mary and his team
came back as well, and they arrived at the fields
near Campion on November two at about the time, at
about the same time as I heard of about fifty EMUs. Uh.
(13:11):
The problem was that the EMUs were out of range
of the machine guns, and some soldiers tried to come
and heard the EMUs toward the guns, which was not
all that effective. They finally did manage to strike a
few birds as they were fleeing for the cover of
nearby trees. And they actually made a base camp on
the land of a man named Joseph Joyce, and they
(13:33):
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 ambus strategy
was a little more successful than the seek and shoot strategy,
but but not really by much. November three passed without
(13:54):
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
birds before the machine gun jammed. The settlers who were
assisting with this operation open fire with their rifles, but
(14:14):
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
smarter than they had thought. Yeah, they didn't count on them,
using the logic of that thing is dangerous, I will
(14:35):
stay away from it. Let's not go there. 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, 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
(14:57):
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 a quarter of their ammunition, which
was about rounds, and with that they had killed two us. Uh.
(15:19):
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 was a little distressing when they were the
ones paying for the bullets. And then on November nine, yes,
(15:40):
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 we would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Did
not work out because, having not asked for permission, they
(16:04):
were ordered to return home. It was not a successful
attempt well, and it most likely actually made things worse,
since the fleeing EMUs than not only had they been
eating wheat, but now they were trampling crops. So the
soldier settlers, though, continued to ask for aid, and Meredith's
reports spoke of the extensive damage that the emu's had done.
(16:25):
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,
after the first burst, a very rapidly moving one and
is only visible for a very short time. Moreover, the
(16:46):
emu is an amazingly hard bird to kill outright, and
many mortal, many carrey 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 held
an EMU with its 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
(17:09):
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
and the Minister of Defense finally said that no military
personnel can be placed there, but that the state government
could have equipment if it found its own qualified operators.
(17:32):
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,
so it was back to Meredith and team, who were
being lampooned as Major Meredith and his married men. They
(17:52):
came back to the area and launched a second offensive
on November thirt and they used Joseph Joyce's property as
their starting point again. They killed about twenty five mus
on November thirte and about the twenty about twenty more
the day after. At about this time, an animal welfare
officer was sent to oversee the reports that so many
birds were apparently being injured and then continuing to run.
(18:16):
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 that was That was his role, but it's unlikely
that it actually made much of an effect. By November fifteen,
(18:37):
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
people thought they were. They were learning range distance and
where was safe and where wasn't. They had boundaries in
(18:59):
their head of how closely could get h 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
by reports about a hundred ems a week. That's what
they were telling people. Brigadier Martin recalled Major Meredith on
(19:27):
December ten. In Martin's reports, he gave an estimated nine
eighty six birds killed and nine thousand, eight hundred sixty
bullets used. That's a suspicious accounting of birds versus bullets,
and that is just multiplying by ten. Yes, there was
an ongoing attempt to get the soldier settlers to repay
(19:47):
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 thirty three because
they know times are hard for everybody. Eventually, T. E. Dixon,
who was the president of the Wheat Growers Union at Campion,
(20:09):
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
Learry eventually got his payment reduced, though to one pound
fourteen shillings. He didn't want to pay anything encountered with
an accounting of how much money he had spent personally
(20:30):
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, and many
sources don't show that anybody ever actually got paid, that
(20:51):
no money changed hands for reimbursement. Now, even though this
is pretty roundly seen as an unsuccessful attempt to curb
the population of EMUs, Western Australians continued to ask for
military help again in ninety four, nine thirty eight, and
nineteen forty three. The military turned down the request all
(21:12):
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 defend their crops and they did
not need anyone's permission, and after World War Two, farmers
(21:36):
were actually issued free ammunition for dealing with vermon Two
hundred and eighty four thousand, seven hundred four EMUs were
known to have been killed by farmers between nineteen forty
five and nineteen sixty so in just fifteen years time, right,
So it seems like while the firing of machine guns
at herds of EMUs not very successful as an attempt
(21:58):
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 for between five thousand
and forty thousand birds a year in Western Australia. Even
(22:21):
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 keep them
out of farmlands, then generally people seem to be okay
(22:42):
with the 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 human population,
and it's tricky. There's no easy answer really that's going
(23:04):
to make it everybody happy. So that's where they've landed
is with bounty. So that that one attempt N two
they fought a battle. They fought a battle, and at
the time things where they were obviously things were hard
in the Great Depression. People really took the opportunity to
to lampoon the military and the government when that was
(23:25):
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 the Emy War, the brief and indeed bizarre
(23:49):
wildlife management attempt in Western Australia. Hey, since these episodes
that were sharing our past class six, we have some
updated information that will supersede the contact stuff you've heard before.
If you want to email us, our email address is
History Podcast at house to works dot com and you
(24:10):
can find us across the spectrum of social media as
Missed in History. You can also find us at Missed
in history dot com, and you can visit our parent company,
howset Works at house to works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.