As Per The Conditions Of Our Defeat In The Emu War Of 1932, Emboldened Emus Arrive In Broken Hill To Assert Their Feathery Dominance

ABC radio in Broken Hill has reported that hordes of emus are descending on the outback town in New South Wales.

The reports say that they have already disrupted a football match, and slowed traffic as these haughty birds skulk about the town.

Experts suggest that the arrival of these emus is a product of the horrible draught current afflicting greater New South Wales, but I know better…

I have been waiting for this day for as long as I can remember because I knew that the emus would strike again.

Back in 1932, Australian veterans returning from the horrors of the first World War arrived home to find that rampaging emus had run amok while the diggers were off digging, and their farms were now overrun with giant birds.

As many as 20,000 emus were roaming the farmlands of Western Australia at the time. So, the Australian government did the only sensible thing you could imagine: they declared war on the emus.

It was easy enough to find soldiers willing to fire on these giant birds, and Major G.P.W Meredith of the Seventh Heavy battery of the Royal Australian Artillery commanded a small troupe of men, armed with two Lewis guns (for the Peaky Blinders fans out there, these were guns that caused all of the kerfuffles in season 1) and ten-thousand rounds of ammunition.

We assumed that the birds could be no match for these trained soldiers.

We were wrong.

The crafty emus were fast, and hard to hit with our clunky, human weaponry. And the vast majority of the birds escaped their lead-based deaths.

According to ornithologist Dominic Serventy, “The machine-gunners’ dreams of point-blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. A crestfallen field force therefore withdrew from the combat area after about a month.”

Yeah… we lost the emu war.

Despite the failed operation, further requests for military aid were made by farmers in 1934, 1943, and 1948, but they were all turned down by the government, who were assumedly still red-faced from losing a battle to a bunch of giant birds.

The emus have largely remained silent since the war, but I knew… I knew they would return to conquer more of this great country, and we’d be just as powerless to stop them when that time came.

So lock up your doors, board your windows, and send the kids off to stay with nan… because the emus are coming, people – the emus are coming.