Historical Remix: The Great Emu War
The Great Emu War is one of those topics that is just completely obscure when you hear about it for the first time. It’s confusing, makes no sense, and ultimately is shocking for everyone involved. The premise of the Emu War was in Australia in 1932, emus began migrating from the center of the country in search of food and water to support themselves. They eventually found themselves on the land of farmers, and were surprised to see the amount of food that lay ahead of them. They began eating the farmers crops and drinking from their water supplies. This action subsequently pissed off the farmers. They tried to move the emus, but failed, so they called up the Australian Military and asked them to scare or kill the emus away from the farmers land. The WWI veterans ventured their way to the farms and saw the emus camped out on private property. They initially fired some shots to try and scare them away, but that failed. They then tried shooting the emus, but as they quickly figured out, the emus are much smarter and faster than many of them realized, so the majority were able to avoid the bullets, giving the victory of battle number one to the birds. The military returned home with a great idea. Machine guns. The new technology, introduced in World War One, would for sure kill and scare away the emus. They went back out to the farms with their upgraded firepower and tried again. After spraying into the farms, they looked to see the damage they did. They failed again. The emus tricked them again. To add to the that, emus are just built different, being able to take up to 10 bullets and still walk it off. The military tried and tried again to succeed, but did very rarely. They managed to kill just under 1,000 emus. However, they wasted 10,000 bullets trying to kill them. The government ultimately stepped in and put an end to the war, taking the defeat as it was getting too costly and it wasn’t effective. Australia, who has yet to lose a war, lost to some birds. A humiliating defeat. If memes were a thing in 1932, then these would be some of the memes sent to the Australian Government for their failure:
While memes like still exist today about the Emu War, they would definitely be more prevalent in 1932 because of the complete military failure on behalf of the Australian Government.
The memes would impact how others see this event because they are clearly biased against Australia and they do not offer any insight as to why they intervened with emus in the first place. Clearly animals eating crops is never a good thing for a farmer, so it makes sense as to why they would want the emus to be removed. However, the information that we get from social media and in particular memes, which is becoming increasingly more popular these days, can easily be biased or sometimes fake, like the meme about the one emu that was killed.
Sources:
Upton, Emily. 2014. “Emus vs. Humans: The Great Emu War of 1932.” Today I Found Out. January 21, 2014. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/01/great-emu-war-1932/#:~:text=The%20end%20result%20of%20the.
“The Great Emu War of 1932 | Stranger than Fiction!” 2018. Nomads – Discover Different. September 25, 2018. https://nomadsworld.com/great-emu-war/.
https://imgflip.com/memegenerator
https://www.memedroid.com/memes/tag/the+great+emu+war
Gault, Matthew. 2015. “Australia Once Lost a War With the Mighty Emu.” Medium. March 21, 2015. https://medium.com/war-is-boring/australia-once-lost-a-war-to-the-mighty-emu-fd0f07203ca4#:~:text=It%20feeds%20bullets%20from%20a.
