BEDTIME STORY: Emu War

There are moments in history that seem almost too strange to be real, and the Great Emu War of 1932 is certainly one of them.

A curious chapter in the long story of Australia that unfolded not in the heat of battle against a foreign power, but across the sunburnt wheat paddocks of Western Australia, where struggling families found themselves overwhelmed by an unexpected invasion.

To understand how such a thing could even happen, we need to step back to the early 1930s, when Australia was still feeling the deep wounds left by the First World War and the crushing economic hardship of the Great Depression.

Many of the farmers living in the wheat belt at the time were returned soldiers, men who had once marched through the mud and the terror of European battlefields and who had been promised a new life on the land when the war ended.

The government had settled them on farms carved out of the vast inland country, offering them the chance to build homes and families in a nation that was still young and growing.

Yet the land they'd received was not always kind and farming in those dry and unpredictable regions was a difficult task even in the best of years.

Rainfall could vanish for months at a time, crops could fail without warning and the thin line between survival and ruin often rested on a single harvest.

By 1932, after years of economic hardship, many of these farmers were already close to breaking point.

And nature added one more challenge.

That year, a particularly dry season drove enormous numbers of emus out of the inland regions where they normally roamed.

These tall, powerful birds began moving towards the farming districts where wheat paddocks and water sources offered an irresistible refuge.

What began as a migration soon turned into something far more serious as tens of thousands of emus flooded into the Wheatbelt around the small settlement of Campion, roughly 3,000 kilometres east of Perth.

Emus, well, they're remarkable creatures, standing well over a metre and a half tall and weighing as much as 40 or 50 kilograms, built for endurance and speed across the harsh Australian landscape.

When they travel in groups, they move like a flowing tide of feathers and muscle, long legs carrying them swiftly over ground that would slow horses or vehicles.

In the wild, these migrations are simply part of the natural rhythm of the land.

But in 1932, they brought disaster to the fragile farms that stood in their path.

The birds feasted on the wheat crops, devouring the young plants that farmers had worked so hard to grow.

But even more destructive was the damage they caused simply by moving through the paddocks.

As the emus ran in long lines across the fields, they trampled great areas of crops flat against the earth, leaving behind acres of ruined harvest.

Worse still, birds smashed through fences that farmers had built to keep rabbits out of their fields.

And once those fences were broken, the rabbits, well, they pulled in, multiplying the destruction.

For farmers who were already struggling to survive, the situation became desperate.

Rifles were not particularly effective against the birds because emus are fast and surprisingly difficult to bring down.

They're capable of running at speeds close to 50 kilometres an hour while scattering quickly in every direction when threatened.

Shooting one bird often meant the rest of the flock simply disappeared instantly into the distance.