The Emu War, the Suspicious Salmon, and Other Bad Days for Common Sense

Setup: In 1932, Australian farmers asked the government for help with enormous flocks of emus damaging crops and breaking through fences. The government responded by sending soldiers armed with two Lewis machine guns and several thousand rounds of ammunition.

Escalation: The emus scattered into smaller groups, ran quickly, and proved inconveniently difficult to hit. One gun jammed. Another operation involved chasing birds by truck, which sounds like the sort of plan that gets approved after everyone has already put on a uniform. The campaign lasted several weeks, and official figures later claimed nearly 1,000 emus had been killed.

Punchline: The military eventually withdrew, while the emus remained in possession of most of the countryside. Major G.P.W. Meredith, who commanded the operation, reportedly observed that the emu machine-gun campaign had made the birds look like the winners.

Setup: Britain’s Salmon Act 1986 addressed illegal fishing, possession, and trade in salmon. This was a reasonable subject for legislation, given that salmon are valuable, slippery, and frequently involved in the sort of transactions that benefit from paperwork.

Escalation: Section 32 made it an offense to receive, retain, dispose of, or arrange the receipt of salmon in circumstances where a person believes, or it would be reasonable to suspect, that an offense has been committed in relation to the fish.

Punchline: British law therefore contains the phrase “handling salmon in suspicious circumstances,” which sounds less like a criminal statute than the opening sentence of a detective novel set behind a fish counter.

Setup: In 1814, a giant vat at a London brewery ruptured and released roughly 570 tons of porter, sending a wave of beer through nearby streets. The flood destroyed buildings and killed eight people.

Escalation: The brewery had suffered a broken hoop on the vat months earlier and had replaced it with additional hoops rather than draining the tank. The resulting structure held more than a million liters of beer under considerable pressure, which is not a sentence engineers enjoy encountering in historical records.

Punchline: The brewery was later found not legally responsible, leaving the city with demolished buildings, a tragic death toll, and the least welcome free round in British history.

This Week in Weird History: In 1932, Australia learned that an emu can defeat a machine gun, but apparently not a well-written newspaper column.