Podcast Episode Page: The Great Emu War

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November 1932. Western Australia. The Australian military mobilizes with Lewis machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to face a devastating enemy: 20,000 emus with an unfortunate taste for wheat.

What followed was one of the most embarrassing defeats in military history—not because the enemy had superior tactics or firepower, but because they were six-foot-tall birds who refused to cooperate with being shot.

This is the story of the Great Emu War: how World War I veterans armed with machine guns were systematically outsmarted by flightless birds, why the operation became an international laughingstock, and what it reveals about humanity's often disastrous attempts to wage war against nature.

Spoiler: The emus won. Decisively.

Setting the Stage: Desperation in the Outback (0:00-1:48)

The Soldier Settlement Scheme (1:48-3:41)

The Military Authorization (3:41-4:21)

Know Your Enemy: The Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) (4:21-6:12)

The Battle Begins: November 2, 1932 (6:12-7:34)

Escalating Absurdity (7:34-8:26)

Major Gwynn's Admission of Defeat (8:26-9:28)

Humanity's War Against Nature (9:28-11:03)

The Success Story: Screwworm Flies (11:03-12:36)

The Aftermath (12:36-13:46)

The Final Lesson (13:46-end)

This episode is based on our newsletter deep-dive: The Great Emu War

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Obscurarium, where we shed a light on history's most obscure corners. In today's deep dive, we are heading to the Southern Hemisphere for a story that, well, it sounds like a fever dream, but I promise you it is entirely real. It's one of those moments in history where you have to double-check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day.

Speaker 2 (0:18) Absolutely. Okay, so picture this. It is late 1932. The Great Depression has the world in a chokehold. We are in the dusty, scorching outback of Western Australia. And you have a military officer, Major G.P.W. Meredith Gwynn. He's standing there staring down the barrel of what would become one of the most embarrassing defeats in, well, maybe all of military history.

Speaker 1 (0:36) And just to set the stakes here, usually when we talk about military defeats, we're talking about being outmaneuvered by, you know, a Napoleon, right, or overwhelmed by superior firepower. Right. But in this case, the enemy wasn't an army. They didn't have rifles. They didn't even have uniforms. The enemy was 20,000 emus—20,000 six-foot-tall birds with, let's just say, a significant attitude problem.

Speaker 2 (1:05) And a very unfortunate taste for wheat. So our mission for today is pretty straightforward. We're going to unpack how a group of feathered vandals—and that is a real quote from the time—managed to outsmart trained soldiers armed with machine guns.

Speaker 1 (1:19) And maybe more importantly, we're going to look at what this very strange event tells us about humanity's often misguided war against nature. Because it's a funny story, yes, but it's also a perfect case study in what happens when we try to solve ecological problems with ballistics.

Speaker 2 (1:48) So let's get into the setup. Desperation in the outback. It's 1932. What exactly is going on in Western Australia that makes the government say, "You know what, let's send in the army against birds"?

Speaker 1 (1:58) To really get it, you have to look at who was living there. These weren't just any farmers. Records show that the people farming this land were primarily World War I veterans.

Speaker 2 (2:09) Oh, wow. So they've already been through hell and back.

Speaker 1 (2:11) Exactly. After the war, the Australian government set up what they called a soldier settlement scheme. The idea was to give these returned servicemen a fresh start, you know, and boost wheat production. Sounds good on paper.

Speaker 2 (2:20) It does. But there was a catch.

Speaker 1 (2:22) There's always a catch. Always. The land they were given was marginal. I mean, right on the edge of the desert. It had never been successfully farmed before. The soil was poor. The rain was unreliable. So you have these men—probably dealing with what we now call PTSD—trying to grow crops in the dust.

Speaker 2 (2:38) And then the Great Depression hits. Wheat prices just tank. So by 1932, these veterans are facing financial ruin. They are desperate.

Speaker 1 (2:48) Yeah. And then the migration happens.

Speaker 2 (2:50) The invasion.

Speaker 1 (2:51) The farmers definitely called it an invasion. But from a biological perspective, it was just bad timing. Emus are nomads. There was a huge drought inland. So they did what they've done for millennia. They moved toward the coast following the scent of water and food.

Speaker 2 (3:05) It just so happened that the food was the only thing keeping these veterans afloat.

Speaker 1 (3:09) Precisely. To the emus, it wasn't an act of war. It was just the world's largest buffet. But the damage—it was catastrophic. Reports from the time show they didn't just eat the crops. They demolished the fences. Just ran right through them. Trampled them. And once the fences were down, they basically created these highways for rabbits—another massive pest—to come in and finish off whatever was left.

Speaker 2 (3:32) That is an absolute nightmare. You're broke. You're a veteran. And now giant birds are destroying your livelihood. So they begged the government for help. But here's the key thing. Because they were ex-military, they thought like soldiers. They didn't ask for subsidies. They asked for machine guns.

Speaker 1 (3:50) And the government said yes. That feels like quite a leap.

Speaker 2 (3:53) They did. The Minister of Defense, Sir George Pearce, he sanctioned the whole thing. Some historians think it was partly a PR move, you know, to show they were doing something for the vets and maybe a bit of live fire target practice.

Speaker 1 (4:06) Two birds with one stone, literally.

Speaker 2 (4:08) So they sent in Major G.P.W. Meredith Gwynn, two Lewis machine guns, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

Speaker 1 (4:16) Okay, a Lewis gun. For those of us who aren't military buffs, what are we talking about here?

Speaker 2 (4:21) It's a World War I-era machine gun. It's considered a light machine gun, but that's relative. It weighs nearly 30 pounds. It's designed for trench warfare. You set it up, you mount it, and you fire at waves of enemies running in a straight line.

Speaker 1 (4:36) Which implies they thought the emus would charge in a straight line.

Speaker 2 (4:40) They thought it would be easy, like shooting oversized chickens. They figured they'd line them up and knock them down.

Speaker 1 (4:45) I have a feeling they didn't really know their enemy. I mean, a bird is a bird, but how tough can it be?

Speaker 2 (4:50) And that brings us to the most important part of this. The emu—Dromaius novaehollandiae—is not just a bird. It is an evolutionary marvel.

Speaker 1 (5:00) Okay, lay it on me. The stats. What was Meredith Gwynn really up against?

Speaker 2 (5:05) All right, first, size. Second-largest bird on Earth. They can be six feet tall, weigh up to 130 pounds. But their real secret weapon for a machine gunner is their speed. They're fast. They can sprint at 30 miles per hour. And not in a straight line. They weave and zigzag.

Speaker 1 (5:25) Right. Trying to track that with a heavy mounted gun is, well, it's almost impossible.

Speaker 2 (5:30) Okay, I can see that. But if you actually hit one, it's going down, surely.

Speaker 1 (5:35) You would think. But the reports describe them as nature's armored personnel carriers.

Speaker 2 (5:40) Armored? How? They're feathers.

Speaker 1 (5:42) They're not soft and downy. They have this coarse, almost Kevlar-textured hair quality. It's for insulation, but it also makes them incredibly tough. Plus, they're just dense muscle and fat.

Speaker 2 (5:54) So they can actually take a bullet.

Speaker 1 (5:56) They can take a bullet and just keep on running. And they can fight back too. They have these three-toed feet with claws that are sharp enough to tear through metal fencing.

Speaker 2 (6:05) And there's that detail about their parenting that just speaks to how unbelievably stubborn they are.

Speaker 1 (6:10) Oh, this is one of my favorite bits of biology. The male emu incubates the eggs. He sits on the nest for eight weeks—two straight months—without eating or drinking.

Speaker 2 (6:20) Wait, nothing? For two months?

Speaker 1 (6:22) Nothing. He loses a third of his body weight. And once those chicks hatch, he defends them ferociously. So what Major Gwynn was facing wasn't just a pest. It was a creature designed by evolution to survive anything.

Speaker 2 (6:36) And he thought he could just show up and scare them away.

Speaker 1 (6:39) That was the plan. It was dead wrong. So let's go to the front lines. The battle begins. It's November 2nd, 1932. Major Gwynn is in position. What happens?

Speaker 2 (6:51) The locals spot about 50 emus near a dam. It's a perfect setup. Flat terrain, clear line of sight. They set up the Lewis gun, get in range, and the order is given to fire.

Speaker 1 (7:03) Yeah. And chaos, but not the kind they wanted. They thought the birds would panic and bunch up. Instead, the emus displayed what ornithologists later called "superior strategy."

Speaker 2 (7:15) Strategy from birds?

Speaker 1 (7:17) Well, instinct that looked like strategy. The moment the firing started, they broke into small groups and scattered in every direction, like a starburst.

Speaker 2 (7:25) So the gunner is trying to swing this heavy weapon around to hit single targets moving erratically.

Speaker 1 (7:30) Exactly. It's impossible. A few went down, but most of them just vanished into the scrub. They used guerrilla tactics without even knowing it.

Speaker 2 (7:38) So round one to the emus.

Speaker 1 (7:40) Decisively. But Gwynn doesn't give up. A few days later they set up an ambush—a huge mob this time, about a thousand emus heading for a dam.

Speaker 2 (7:50) A thousand. Okay, you can't miss a thousand targets.

Speaker 1 (7:53) You'd think not. They wait until the birds are at point-blank range. They pull the trigger and the gun jams.

Speaker 2 (8:00) No. You're joking.

Speaker 1 (8:02) After just a handful of shots, the mechanism failed. The emus, of course, scattered immediately. It was a complete and utter disaster.

Speaker 2 (8:10) It feels like a sign from the universe to just go home.

Speaker 1 (8:13) It does. And even when they did get the guns working, they were just baffled by how durable the birds were. Gwynn was reportedly shocked that birds were getting hit by .303 caliber rounds and just kept going.

Speaker 2 (8:26) Like something out of a zombie movie.

Speaker 1 (8:28) It really was. There's this one famous story where they're chasing a single bird in a truck with a machine gun mounted on the back. The bird was running so fast over such rough ground that the gunner couldn't aim, and the truck actually crashed into a fence.

Speaker 2 (8:44) The emus are now taking out vehicles. This is escalating.

Speaker 1 (8:48) By the end of the first week, the scorecard was just dismal. They'd used 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

Speaker 2 (8:54) For how many kills?

Speaker 1 (8:56) The official numbers are a bit fuzzy, but the best estimate is somewhere between 50 and 200 birds.

Speaker 2 (9:02) That's... that is an unbelievably bad ratio.

Speaker 1 (9:05) It is. Which leads to my favorite quote from the whole affair. Major Gwynn, in his official report, said—and I'm quoting here—"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world."

Speaker 2 (9:20) Wow. He's admitting they're basically super soldiers.

Speaker 1 (9:23) The bullet-carrying capacity. He was completely demoralized. The birds were faster, tougher, and their tactics, even if accidental, were just better. And you can't keep something like this quiet. The press must have had an absolute field day.

Speaker 2 (9:37) Oh, it became front-page news around the world. The PR disaster was almost worse than the military one. I saw one headline from an American paper: "Machine Guns Fail to Halt Emu Invaders in Australia."

Speaker 1 (9:49) Which is just brutal.

Speaker 2 (9:50) And there were newsreels. You could go to the cinema and watch footage of Australian soldiers chasing birds around the outback and failing. It looked like a comedy sketch. The public was laughing at them. So the government had no choice. They called Major Gwynn back. The operation was called off. The emus won.

Speaker 1 (10:10) And they celebrated by eating more wheat.

Speaker 2 (10:13) It's a hilarious story. But if we zoom out, this isn't the only time humans have tried to use military force against nature and failed spectacularly.

Speaker 1 (10:22) No, not at all. And this is where the story goes from funny to, well, something much more significant. You mentioned Rome earlier.

Speaker 2 (10:29) Right. Ancient Rome used legions to fight locusts. They used fire, smoke. The locusts just flew away and came back. But there's a much darker example in the 20th century.

Speaker 1 (10:40) This would be the Four Pests Campaign in China.

Speaker 2 (10:43) Exactly. Under Mao Zedong, starting in 1958. This was a national mobilization—a war on rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.

Speaker 1 (10:54) Sparrows? Why sparrows?

Speaker 2 (10:56) For the same reason as the emus. They were eating grain. So the government ordered the entire population to kill them.

Speaker 1 (11:03) How do you even do that?

Speaker 2 (11:05) You don't use guns. You use exhaustion. People would bang pots and pans for days on end to stop the birds from landing. The sparrows would fly until they literally dropped dead from the sky.

Speaker 1 (11:16) That's horrifying. But I guess it worked.

Speaker 2 (11:19) Oh, it was devastatingly effective. They nearly wiped out the sparrow population in China. But there was a consequence—a catastrophic one. They forgot that sparrows don't just eat grain. They also eat insects, specifically locusts. With their main predator gone, the locust population exploded. And they didn't just eat a little grain like the sparrows. They ate everything.

Speaker 1 (11:43) So by trying to save the grain, they caused a much bigger problem.

Speaker 2 (11:47) It was a major contributing factor to the Great Chinese Famine, which killed tens of millions of people. It's just this horrifying lesson. In Australia, the military failed and it was a comedy. In China, they succeeded and it was a tragedy.

Speaker 1 (12:03) It's such a stark reminder of how complex these ecosystems are. You pull one thread and the whole thing can unravel. So I have to ask, do we ever get it right? Is there a success story in our war against pests?

Speaker 2 (12:16) Actually, yes. And it's the perfect counterpoint because it relied on biology, not bullets. It's the story of the screwworm fly in the U.S. in the 1950s.

Speaker 1 (12:26) Screwworm fly sounds delightful.

Speaker 2 (12:28) It was a nightmare. The larvae would eat the living flesh of livestock—a huge economic problem. So what was the plan?

Speaker 1 (12:35) It was brilliant. It's called the sterile insect technique. I like to think of it as biological jujitsu.

Speaker 2 (12:41) Okay, explain.

Speaker 1 (12:42) Scientists mass-produced male screwworm flies in labs—millions of them. They zapped them with radiation to make them sterile. Then they released them into the wild.

Speaker 2 (12:53) They fought flies with more flies.

Speaker 1 (12:55) Exactly. Because here's the key. Female screwworm flies only mate once.

Speaker 2 (13:00) Ah, I see it now. If a female mates with one of the sterile males, her one chance at reproduction is wasted. Her eggs never hatch.

Speaker 1 (13:08) By flooding the environment with sterile males, the odds of a female finding a fertile partner drop to almost zero.

Speaker 2 (13:14) That is incredibly smart. You're using their own biology against them.

Speaker 1 (13:18) And it worked perfectly. The screwworm was completely eliminated from North America. No bombs, no poison, just science.

Speaker 2 (13:26) So the lesson from the emu war is that victory came from understanding the enemy, not just trying to overwhelm it.

Speaker 1 (13:33) 100 percent. Gwynn used brute force. Yes. The screwworm scientists used intelligence.

Speaker 2 (13:39) So let's wrap this up. The soldiers go home defeated. What happens to our feathered victors?

Speaker 1 (13:45) They thrived. The emu population today is incredibly healthy—somewhere around 700,000 of them. Their conservation status is "least concern."

Speaker 2 (13:54) Doing just fine.

Speaker 1 (13:55) And the irony is they're now an economic asset. People farm them for their oil, for their low-fat meat, for their huge decorative eggs.

Speaker 2 (14:03) From public enemy number one to a cash crop. But there is one last perspective we have to touch on, and that's the indigenous one.

Speaker 1 (14:12) This is such a crucial point. For the settlers, the emus were a plague. But for indigenous Australians, the emu is a creator spirit—a core part of their culture and the land for millennia. They didn't see an invasion. They saw a natural cycle. They knew how to live with the emu, not wage war against it.

Speaker 2 (14:30) Exactly. The whole military operation was really just a monument to how little the colonial settlers understood the very environment they were trying to control.

Speaker 1 (14:40) It really makes you think about our whole concept of conquering nature.

Speaker 2 (14:44) It does. And maybe the thought to leave everyone with is this. We think victory belongs to the one with the biggest gun. But the Great Emu War shows that sometimes victory belongs to the ones who know the territory.

Speaker 1 (14:57) And who refused to play by the rules.

Speaker 2 (15:00) Exactly. The emus proved that just showing up, scattering, and enduring is its own winning strategy. They outlasted the bullets. They outlasted the politicians. And they're still out there today.

Speaker 1 (15:12) Well, I, for one, welcome our new feathered overlords.

Speaker 2 (15:15) Me too. Thank you for listening to Obscurarium. If you enjoyed this deep dive and want more of these, please subscribe to this podcast and find us at obscurarium.com for even more content, including our weekly newsletter. Until next time.

Books:

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This episode is based on our newsletter deep-dive: The Great Guano Madness: The Forgotten Scramble That Gave America Its Imperial Playbook

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