During World War I, Australia shipped some 334,000 of its young men to Europe where nearly one in five died in the trenches and an additional one out of two were wounded. So you know, not exactly all that fun of a time, probably because the British had the habit of utilizing the Aussies for suicidal attacks. Anyways, as thanks for their sacrifice, the Australian government generously offered 1,000 acres of farmland to each veteran who might want it, of which some 24,000 accepted. This of course was not good land, but rather shitty land on the edge of the god forsaken desert that is Australia’s interior, but governments fucking over veterans is fairly common, so there you go.
Now out of all of these new entrepreneurial farmers across the country, probably nobody was screwed over quite as much as those residing in Western Australia. Not only did they have to make fertile the most god awful marginal land you can imagine, but they also had to deal with a ridiculous number of marauding rabbits, a non-native species which had aggressively proliferated to the point that at the start of the twentieth century the government built an 1,100 mile rabbit proof fence across the country to try and stop them from eating every field in Western Australia to nubbins. However, having survived the war to end all wars, the veterans were nothing else if not resilient. By digging wells and planting drought resistant crops like wheat, they managed to carve out a moderate amount of success, at least until the Great Depression began. At which point crop prices collapsed and things just went completely to shit.
Now believe it or not, for some reason the powers that be in Australia have never really given two shits about the far off remotely populated western half of the country. Though they made promises to provide some aid to the farmers, they kind of just forgot to do it, leading to many in Western Australia to start seriously considering secession as a viable option. It was this point, in 1932, that a giant flock of some 20,000 emus showed up. Driven from the interior by a drought and attracted by the abundance of food and water, the giant birds began eating the crops of the veterans and knocking big holes in the rabbit proof fence. Deciding that enough was enough already, the former soldiers sent a delegation to the Australian government demanding something be done. Not really wanting to be bothered or spend a lot of money, the government announced they would send two heavy machine gun crews to deal with the emus. The veterans, having seen many of their compatriots killed by machine guns, were fully onboard.
Of course, the entire thing was a complete cluster fuck. For some reason, the emus weren’t really down with the idea of just standing around while a couple schmucks blasted hot lead at them. The moment the shooting started they scattered every which way, making them very difficult to hit. To make matters worse, these were old timey machine guns, meaning they were a real bitch to move around and setup. Despite shooting thousands of rounds, the Australian army managed to kill only around 500 emus over the course of a month, which was less than a success considering thousands more emus were flocking into the area. Though the military proudly, and falsely, claimed they killed thousands of emus, all while suffering no casualties of their own, the campaign against the emus was declared a failure and ended.
The government providing machine guns to shoot emus, you know, rather than actual financial aid for farmers, resulted in nearly two thirds of voters in Western Australia voting to secede from the country a few months later. Like everything with Western Australia, this was completely ignored by the Australian government, though they did start providing funds to build emu proof fences and put a bounty on the bird that resulted in some 57,000 being killed by hunters over the next year. Despite this, the farming veterans requested machine gunners be sent again in 1934, 1943, and 1948. Probably because though it was less than effective, there is just something kind of bad ass about blasting at wildlife with rapid fire weapons.