Did Australia really lose a war against emus?

Sort of, though it was never really a war. In late 1932, the Australian Army sent a small team with machine guns to cull emus that were wrecking wheat farms in Western Australia. The birds proved so hard to hit that the soldiers were withdrawn after a week, to widespread ridicule.

The farmers were First World War veterans who had been given land in marginal country. During the Great Depression they were pushed to grow more wheat, and then around 20,000 emus arrived and started eating and trampling the crops. The veterans knew what machine guns could do, so they asked for some.

Major Meredith took two soldiers, two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. It went badly. The emus split into small groups and ran. At one ambush, a gun jammed after killing just 12 birds. A gun mounted on a truck couldn't keep up. Meredith's report said his men suffered no casualties, except for their dignity, and he later said emus could face machine guns like tanks.

The soldiers came back for a second round and Meredith claimed 986 kills, a number historians consider inflated. Farmers asked for the army again in later years and were refused. What worked better was paying hunters: 57,034 emu bounties were claimed in just six months of 1934. So Australia didn't exactly lose, but the emus certainly won the headlines.