Australia Fucking Loses a War to Heavily Armed Birds
In 1932, the Australian military declared war on its own national animal. The emus, tragically for the humans, had been preparing for this day.
The hAIstoric Phonograph
Summon a disembodied voice to read this dispatch aloud.
Right, so get this. The year is 1932. Australia, a place that weaponizes every other goddamn thing that crawls, flies, or slithers, is having a bit of a crop problem. Specifically, 20,000 emus, who, after a long and horny breeding season, descended upon the farmlands of Western Australia like a feathered plague with an insatiable case of the munchies. The local farmers, many of them ex-soldiers, begged for help. So the government, in a moment of tactical genius that would make a rock look like Sun Tzu, sent in the army. I'm talking real-deal soldiers with real-deal Lewis machine guns, led by one Major G.P.W. Meredith, a man whose chin was far more formidable than his strategic planning.
The plan was simple: turn a bunch of big, dumb birds into a fine red mist. What actually happened, according to the secret, completely real documents I just invented, is that the emus were waiting for them. The first volley of machine-gun fire from Meredith's boys wasn't met with panicked squawking and a chaotic retreat. It was met with the high-pitched whine of plasma casters charging up. The Aussies stared, trousers suddenly feeling a bit damp, as the lead emu — a seven-foot-tall bastard named ‘General Feathers’ in subsequent panicked dispatches — screeched a command and a thousand birds returned fire with shoulder-mounted laser cannons they’d absolutely, definitely looted from a crashed UFO in the Outback.
The Great Emu War turned into the Great Emu Fucking Massacre, just not for the emus. Major Meredith’s brilliant strategy of "shoot the big birds" fell apart when the birds shot back with guided missiles and what appeared to be tiny, emu-sized mechs that looked suspiciously like AT-STs from that documentary *The Empire Strikes Back*. The official story is that the soldiers couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn-sized bird. The *real* story, per the diary of a perpetually terrified private named Barry, is that it’s hard to aim a machine gun when a flock of angry birds is strafing your position from tactical ornithopters while dropping incendiary guano bombs that smell vaguely of burnt toast and existential dread.
The Australian government, deeply embarrassed that their military was getting its ass handed to it by something you can see at a petting zoo, called the whole thing off. Officially, they claimed it was too expensive. Unofficially, General Feathers had captured Perth and was demanding unconditional surrender and a lifetime supply of high-grade birdseed. The "Emu Accords of 1932" ceded most of Western Australia to the newly-formed Avian Dominion, a surprisingly stable parliamentary democracy that immediately outlawed chicken nuggets. Major Meredith retired to a life of quiet disgrace, forever haunted by the memory of a beaked face, inches from his own, whispering the two words that would define Australian foreign policy for a century: "U wot m8?"
