Emu War

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Overview

The Emu War refers to an unsuccessful month-long Australian initiative in 1932 to try and curb the population of emus, a long-legged, flightless bird, in the Campion district in Western Australia, by employing soldiers with guns to hunt the emu. Long a subject of mockery, The Emu War has been referenced in various memes, spiking in the mid-2010s.

Background

In 1932, as farmers in Western Australia during the Great Depression prepared their annual crops, as many as 20,000 emus began to inhabit farm territory.^[1] The government responded by sending World War I veterans and machine guns to the territory to attempt to massacre the emus. On November 2nd, 1932, soldiers began the initiative. However, killing the emus was more difficult than the soldiers anticipated, as the emus would scatter in different directions at the sound of gunfire. The local media lampooned the event by calling it "The Emu War" and praised the emus' "guerrilla warfare tactics."

Developments

The event grew into a legendary failure of the Australian military over the course of the following century. Online, it started becoming fodder for memes in the mid-2010s, covered by Uncyclopedia^[3] and Encyclopedia Dramatica.^[4] The latter notes that the Emu War is often referenced on 4chan in response to a post by an Australian. On February 2nd, 2014 Tumblr user kakarrot^[8] made a post saying that they told their class about "the Great Emu War" with said class not believing them until it was looked up (shown below).

On July 11th, 2014, Buzzfeed^[2] included a thread on the above Tumblr post in a post about Tumblr and Australia.

On May 1st, 2015, webcomic Veritable Hokum^[5] published a popular comic explaining the ordeal (shown below). A subreddit devoted to playacting an alternate universe where the Emu War went more like World War I, /r/Emuwarflashbacks,^[6] was created in early 2016 by Reddit user Fumblerful.^[7] It has gained over 20,000 subscribers as of May 8th, 2017, and was featured in a Vice^[8] article published in February of that year.