Twenty-four years after King Edward VII granted a coat of arms to the Commonwealth of Australia, Australians declared war on the emu.

The birds lost the battle but won the war.

In November 1932 Australia was limping through the Depression when emu numbers skyrocketed and launched a full frontal assault on West Australian wheat farms.

Authorities called in the army.

Turkey shoot

It had been a dry spring and some 20,000 birds were reported to have abandoned the marginal lands and invaded wheat paddocks where water was abundant.

Not only did they trample crops, but the propensity of emus to run in straight lines knocked down kilometres of fences erected to keep rabbits at bay.

A Major G.W. Meredith, Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O'Halloran were equipped with an American-made light machine gun and ordered into battle.

It quickly became a turkey shoot.

The first skirmish took place on November 2 at Campion, nearly 300 east of Perth, where the Lewis gun jammed after killing about 20 birds.

The army unit then moved south and may have killed another 300 birds before a cease fire order came from Melbourne.

After the withdrawal, Major Meredith compared the emus to Zulus.

"If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world... They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop," he reported.

Satires on the "Great Emu War"

At the behest of emu-addled farmers, the army took the field again on November 13 and in the next three weeks Major Meredith claimed 986 birds had been shot dead with 9860 bullets, exactly 10 rounds per confirmed kill. He reported another 2500 wounded emus died.

Back East, the killings received widespread publicity and a wave of sympathy came out for the birds.

Newspapers were running satires on the "Great Emu War", picture theatre patrons in Sydney were revolted by footage showing birds fleeing the machine gun or wounded. In England, conservationists protested the cull as "extermination of the rare emu". The Perth ornithologist Dominic Serventy deemed it "an attempt at the mass destruction of the birds".

On November 18 the Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce was asked in parliament if a more humane method of killing the birds could be found rather than machine-gunning.

Sir George said people who had only seen emus at a zoo could not image the havoc they wrought in a wheat crop.

"They trample down the crops and rifles were useless in attempts to prevent their depredations," he said.

Machine gun party's method described as humane

Sir George assured parliament that the West Australian government and local farmers were splitting the expedition costs with the Commonwealth and the machine gun party's method were humane: "Wounded birds were quickly despatched."

But the army was beaten and did not take the field again. WA farmers requested military assistance in 1934. Canberra would not have a bar of it.

The Perth government was forced to introduce and pay for a bounty system that saw more than 57,000 emus die in 1934.

WA continued to pay a bounty until wild emus came under protection of federal legislation to protect biodiversity in 1999 and their numbers are believed to be higher than it was before European settlement.