Peter Sullivan, Sophomore
All throughout human history, mankind has fought against nature. From our humble beginnings as cavemen, hunting for food and developing crude tools in order to survive, to the modern day, where we struggle to combat and cure a deadly virus that has engulfed the entire planet. Nature has always opposed us humans, but occasionally those oppositions are more strange than deadly. One such example of this is the Emu War that took place in Australia in 1932.
Less of a war and more of a military operation, the Emu War began right after the end of the first World War. Many discharged veterans of the war were given pieces of land by the Australian government and took up farming. However, when the Great Depression rolled around in 1929, the prices of many crops, including wheat, fell. With the government promising and failing to provide aid, farmers faced a massive struggle in trying to increase the growth of their crops, especially wheat. This struggle was only exacerbated by the migration of nearly 20,000 emus in 1932. Emus are large, flightless birds native to Australia. With the winter of that year approaching, the emus had moved inland and taken up residence on the cultivated lands of the farmers, leading to the destruction of many crops. The farmers asked the government to do something about the emu infestation. In response, the government sent in a small militia of ex-soldiers armed with Lewis machine guns and tasked with gunning down as many emus as possible. The militia was placed under the command of Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith, and over the course of the next month the militia battled with the birds, attempting on two separate operations to kill as many as possible. On both occasions, the humans failed, as the emus were simply too quick for the machine guns of the Australians. Eventually, after only a month of fighting and only about 986 out of thousands killed.
In the end, the AUstralian government pulled the plug on the operation. The soldiers were sent back home, and instead excessive fencing and other such tactics were employed in order to keep the emus out of the farmland. This story highlights the everlasting truth of our world. Humanity and nature will always be at war. But in the end, nature will always win.