Ada: Meredith's final report claimed exactly nine hundred and eighty-six emus killed, from nine thousand eight hundred and sixty rounds. A perfect ten-to-one ratio.1
Theo: Ten rounds per bird, exactly? That's suspiciously tidy.
Ada: Historians think it's bookkeeping, not a real field count. He also claimed another twenty-five hundred wounded died in the scrub, but that rests entirely on farmers' hearsay. Either way, fewer than a thousand dead out of twenty thousand changed nothing.1
Theo: And didn't the government send the farmers a bill?
Ada: In nineteen thirty-three they invoiced the Walgoolan farmers for the ten thousand rounds. The farmers refused, and filed a counter-claim for nine hundred pounds of grain destroyed by, quote, the enemy.1
Theo: So what actually solved it, if not machine guns?
Ada: The dull answer. Bounties and fences. In nineteen thirty-four alone, settlers claimed bounties on over fifty-seven thousand emus. Between forty-five and sixty, about two hundred and eighty-five thousand. And over a thousand kilometres of vermin-proof fencing in the fifties.1
Theo: So ordinary hunters with cash incentives did hundreds of times what the army managed.
Ada: By a staggering margin. And Pearce paid for it too. In the nineteen thirty-seven election, Wheatbelt farmers rallied behind the slogan Put Pearce Last, and ended his thirty-six years in the Senate.1
Theo: That's the part the meme misses. There were real, ruined people under that joke.
Ada: That's what I keep coming back to. Veterans promised a future, handed bad land and a collapsing market, fighting birds because the government that failed them offered guns instead of help. The absurdity is real, but so was the desperation.
Theo: And if you ever want to stop us and ask something, where those bounties went, what happened to Meredith, just interrupt the episode and ask.
Ada: The emus, in the end, simply outlasted everyone. This was Historai, where history answers back.