The Great Emu War • Puppet History

[Music] welcome one and also puppet history season four today we're taking an ever whining look at yet another chapter in the heavy heavy book we call history while our guests ruthlessly compete for the covenant title of history master i'm your beloved host the professor wow what a crowd oh ryan perkara good to see you in person are you ready you know it's really good to see you i've been doing a lot of thinking over the the offseason here and i've been going to therapy oh good i feel like i've been really nasty to you and uh not a good student oh you know i'm really sorry i'm really excited for this semester wow the beef boy is dead the mom lived the beef boy well you don't want the beef boiled long live no new beef but beyond beef boy beyond that's good special guest and top banana kate peterman are you ready i'm ready i feel like i have tough competition now no i'm really happy you're here too it's good to see you kate what the is happening oh this is freaky man let's crack in so good to see you guys i kind of forgot you were bigger than me yeah i could see how that would be easy to forget that's scary you guys are so big okay i haven't heard that a lot in my life so thank you i have and i don't like it oh god i'm sorry i didn't to begin what do you guys think about birds birds that's right birds love birds yeah i love them i think they're hilarious when they run i saw a pigeon trip over a twig once i talked about it for years i love birds too i've never had a bird i have a friend named shane who had a pet bird and he ate it sounds like a sexy guy is that shane shame a day yeah shane you ate your pet bird wherever you are shane well today's story has birds and so much more guns for instance rabbits too and the fact that governments don't care what happens to their veterans after they return from war but most of all birds lots of birds we're going down under to talk about the emu war of 1932. oh you're talking dinosaur birds yeah those big ass birds with those meaty meaty legs what's an inu and emu is the the emu i think i thought he said i n u i think for this episode we're going to go with an emu pronunciation right [Music] okay i got it let me do it one more time just so you could make sure i'm saying it right immune that's beautiful oh wait is this what it feels like to learn yeah now before the emu war there was the great war the war to end all wars or as it's better known today world war one while much of the fighting took place in the trenches of europe there's a reason it's called a world war the men of australia were not spared participation for living so far away more than 300 000 australians fought in world war one and when the fighting stopped those men were looking forward to resuming their lives in oz however as every nation who sends her sons to battle knows the problem with returning soldiers is that while they were gone life went on specifically their jobs got filled by other people what's an economy to do with a sudden influx of thousands of unemployed men many of them now coping with disabilities our first question what did australia propose to do with their returning world war one veterans a have them stay in europe b have them collect eggs for a living or c have them move out to the wilderness okay don't mess this up ryan don't mess it up ryan hey that's it never mind all right ryan what do you got i'm gonna go with c in the wilderness they put them out in the wilderness oh great okay and kate after much trial and tribulation i'm gonna go with b they collected eggs that'd be fun points to be fine i think it's beyond these boys points to beyond beef boy yes australia embarked on a campaign to have their veterans move out to the wilderness of western australia to settle the land not only would this provide a place and career for those roughened soldiers but it would also help the country expand and grow their agricultural output i could use a little more space a yard i'd love more space you know i'm a little chicken i'm scared of people breaking in but you'd be away from people that's what you think oh maybe i would i just don't like the idea of no one being able to hear me scream well i guess if you're screaming out there there's probably someone else there who will hear you screaming the attacker would hear me assume they liked it okay i'm scaring myself okay well then let's move on are you okay no so scared yeah i know the feeling this plan however wasn't so much financial assistance as it was an advertising campaign unlike america's own fraught westward expansion the australian government wasn't just giving away land to any white guy who wanted it soldier settlers got a loan from the government then went on to buy the land essentially they swapped their guns for a mountain of debt that chained them to some barely arable land on the far side of the country where people were scarce and the resources scarcer their best ticket out was to start planting some amber waves of grain wheat ryan i gotta say i can see you being a wheat farmer and just sort of i could see you walking through your fields of golden wheat holding your hands out oh yeah letting the the little blades caress your fingertips i've long dreamed of that it's not as nice as you'd think no it's quite have you done it yeah what i've been on farms and and so like i'm from the sticks basically so i've been in i believe it was wheat you know wheat when you see it yeah maybe it wasn't wheat oh maybe it was just grass maybe i just got lost i think you just walked through some grass at some point just walked into a bale of hay it sounds like you've been to a park now growing wheat in western australia was tough work frost could destroy crops in the wintertime and rabbits were a constant problem while not much beyond prayers could be done about the former expansive fencing took care of those little bunnies and though life was difficult it wasn't impossible a string of good wheat seasons in the 1920s meant australia's plan looked like it was actually going to work then what hey there was a bit of an economic hiccup b bird flu swept through western australia or c the military wanted their soldiers back what was our great depression but that was in america yeah well that would influence other places right with like trade and stuff i don't know fry what do you got i put c they wanted their soldiers back okay and kate i put a there's something going on with the economy that's a jelly for kate peter yes sir that economic hiccup is better known today as the great depression and it caused the floor to fall out under the price of sweet right because of beer huh right wheat beer i mean like also like probably like food and stuff that they make oh my god yeah you know what i'll give an extra jelly i'll give an extra jelly to kate that feels like an astute observation i don't know if it's true but um that is certainly a way to go that's a good way to go about it yeah excuse me okay now the great depression meant crashing wheat prices which in turn meant these soldier settlers were in desperate trouble for help they turned to the folks who told them to move west and start farming in the first place the government you guys think the government's actually going to help them out here yeah you do no okay you're right now the government's big idea was to guarantee the price of wheat that the farmers would be paid or rather promised to guarantee the price the government was itself having financial problems and subsidizing wheat growers wasn't top priority a pattern emerged of politicians promising financial help then not delivering the goods when it came down to a vote they didn't promise they promised to promise don't worry i'm saying sorry for not apologizing yeah it sounds like a politician this is one cutting episode of puppet history take that politicians that's right sometimes you are untruthful this string of broken price promises went on for years meanwhile the price of wheat kept falling and the soldier settlers got angrier as they should imagine if the president promised you a good paying job if you move to oh i don't know odessa texas but when you got there it was also just an internship that quote paid an experience you'd be pissed on the eve of harvest 1932 the growers decided to take a stand unless the government actually got their act together and helped them they would refuse to load their grain onto the railroad cars with no grain harvest coming in wheat and bread prices would become costly across the country right in the middle of the great depression when people could least afford it the government refused to help so the farmers refused to farm it was a standoff okay look at that it's time for a puppet poppin a thing we have always done on this show uh let's see who's on the jellytelly this week hi oh hey hi are you are you gonna say your thing oh what i'm just a catchphrase to you no i just you always seem to relish it so i thought yo i guess i do yeah it's me that big pile of diamonds with a real doozy of accusing and i'm gonna make this quick because i've gotta get ready for the party a party uh why were you not invited uh i'm sure i was i'm just uh i don't check my mail i'm too busy teaching nerd okay here we go what happened in the standoff between the farmers and the government baby a the government gave in to the demands and finally passed relief for the farmers b the military was sent in to take the crops and load the grain themselves or c birds okay thanks man all right well study hard etc whatever time to get my go nod and grab my veggie tray out of the fridge bye see you later um what do you guys got for that i'm gonna go see for cluck cluck a little bird okay okay you know chicken's a bird right very technically yes it's a bird you can't fly though they're like the buzz lightyear kind of fly if i could fly like that you would tell people i could fly if kate could jump up in the air and float around for 15 seconds i'd be like yo that lady can fly yeah that's true and i also went with c i think we got a couple c doves you know what i recognize the brilliance of this bit now it's pretty bark with me or over this bit just gets better and better every season we're actually gonna find out the answer through our first puppet theater performance of the season i'll see you guys in just a second i can't wait oh do i poop excuse me crikey you runny government blokes always screwing us hard working farmers real crikey you greedy farmers want us government blokes to do all your work for you why are you older no i'm the one who ordered wait oh they're gonna fight you hear that yeah what is that it sounds like 40 thousand feet running straight towards us yeah it kind of does what are you oh my god run there's emus everywhere and they're definitely not just added in post you guys could see these beautiful amy look at them how did you do that that was crazy what did you have twenty thousand hands yeah yeah i guess you're 40 000. why wouldn't there be 40 000 feet then wait what you said there'd be 20 000 hands but there would still be because they're birds so you would have 10 000. stop doing that points to both of you are you guys okay i'm still thinking what you were saying 40 000 feet i'll explain it later i thought you were talking about the bird's hands the birds like it was a have wings kate uh jelly bean decay oh my god you are fixing this in my favor and i'm loving it that's right emus is what happened babe 20 000 of them sent upon the farms of western australia right as the wheat crop was ready to be harvested the birds have arrived in our story now good luck getting rid of them 40 000 right now no no what the is so hard for you to understand because about how many feet birds have have you ever seen a four-legged bird or a one-legged bird birds because they're forty thousand feet so you know at least you didn't let me take the fall by myself yeah we i've been disruptive i think now emus are known for their curiosity and inquisitiveness especially towards humans australian aboriginal people for example would lure emus by waving sticks around from behind a tree though flightless the birds still migrated across the seasons and wheat fields turned out to be tasty little stretches for those birds to pass through when a funk of emus ran across your wheat field you knew it not just because they'd munch on the weed and drink the water in the paddocks standing up to five and a half feet tall weighing up to 120 pounds and running at up to 45 miles per hour emu's trample any crops they're around that bird moves really fast i had a car that couldn't go over 40 miles an hour and it's packed outside while fencing had been effective to keep the rabbits out emus proved more challenging as one senator brown pointed out while discussing the problem quote ordinary fences such as keep out dingoes and kangaroos offer no obstacle to emus for the birds take them in their stride or knock them down and thus let the rabbits into the crops the emu problem was also a fence problem and a rabbit problem if nothing was done australia would have a lot less wheat in 1933. for help the soldier settlers turned to the one branch of government they knew firsthand could accomplish something the ministry of defense on november 1st major gpw meredith sergeant s mcmurray and gunner j o'halloran set off for campion western australia with two louis machine guns 10 000 rounds of ammo and something else what else did the three soldiers have with them a a film crew b a team of ornithologists from the university of melbourne or c syphilis that was a curveball yeah sorry about that all right ryan what do you got i'm gonna go for a4 action they got the camera crew with hollywood tinsel town baby uh i went with b a bunch of ornithologists and jelly beans foreign uh yeah that's right it wasn't just bullets that were gonna be shot but film as well someone in authority apparently wanted to document the crusade against the emu scourge and folks were quick to guess why perhaps a movie where a pair of machine gunners wipe out thousands of emus would be a relatively cheap way for the fat cats in canberra to pretend they cared about these farmers all along it was a propaganda ploy plain and simple with the thinking being that hopefully at the end of this the farmers would forget their economic demands and load their emu blood-soaked harvest onto the trains after all that is a wild thought this is how we get back in the good graces of the people we'll shoot a film of us massacring birds yeah with a machine gun uh they kind of did that in america with the bald eagle right we shot a bunch of bald eagles oh it was america's past time for a while murdering those beautiful beautiful birds eagle in person i always wanted to but i worry that i would be with my cat when i saw it and so i've braced myself to get ready to punch a bird if i had to oh because you wouldn't they would take it it would change this is really resonating so you would punch and strangle a bald eagle if it came between you and pete i would rip its heart out okay oh we went to an ostrich farm once and that bird was scary as hell i can imagine if that bad boy got top speed head-butted me that'd be the old picture wrap on the bagooz incredible line it sure was an incredible life meredith and his men must have felt pretty confident when they arrived in campion on november 2nd just in time to meet at least 40 emus the birds were about a kilometer away a long distance for the lewis guns but why not try anyways after the first bursts of gunfire the birds ran for the cover of some trees but a few had been struck the shots may not have been heard around the world but australia's war against the emus had begun now were these emus organized did they know they were partaking in a war were they all like let's go on a marathon jog right you know what you're anticipating a little bit of what we're gonna be talking about and i like to see that so we're giving a jelly to the burgoose yeah how do you feel hold on let me just let me analyze this moment how does it feel my body he's twitching accept it you deserve that i do deserve it feels good yeah it feels good i like it a couple days later on november 4th the men found themselves in the exact situation they'd been waiting for a machine gun loaded and ready a mere 100 yards away from a flock of more than 1 000 emus gathered by a dam that's a lot of birds that's a damn big fruit i think she's trying to activate the winter soldier 17. those sons of have been ransacking wheat fields for too long the only thing left was to pull the trigger and watch the emu carcasses pile up is that in the script or was that just an opinion that was in the script oh thank god okay yeah wait you wrote that down though yeah this red light usually indicates a question but now that we're back in the same room and smelling each other's beautiful sense it's time for a game okay here we go now for this put on your little military hats here we have some emus just chilling hanging out eating some wheat yum yum yum now under your chair you'll find a firearm oh hell yeah dude i want you to murder as many emus as you can a jelly bean for every beak you bring me now are you gonna stand there behind them yeah why what should i not you're directly behind the target well just don't hit me three shots each kate take it away all right [Laughter] oh okay [Music] take it away come on let's do it that was good that was a good shot that was a good shot that's a good shot got this okay oh jesus ryan bring us home yeah me and you in that emu war pack your bag boys war's over i got one more left do you have any last words professor hit me hit me i want you to hit me [Music] we got ourselves a couple sharpshooters out there great work guys i'm gonna give you three jelly beans each thank you sure congratulations you did a lot better than the australian military i could tell you that now o'halloran managed to bring down only about a dozen emus before his gun jammed by the time he had reloaded the emus had booked it out of range but it wasn't just the speed that had spoiled this would-be slaughter as one sydney newspaper would write the toughness of their feathered hides made them immune to glancing volleys of machine gun bullets and the feathers weren't just good armor they also made the birds look like bigger targets than they actually were emus also bleed slowly and most of their insides are gut traps instead of vital organs meaning the birds can be shot several times and keep running with little difficulty wow terminators we gotta get more emus in our military killing i don't know if that's the takeaway here i guess it would probably be a good attention-grabbing tactic on the military it's a fear tactic you know how to scare a human have you bust a couple rounds into its chest and it just go just gets angrier i don't understand he's here for the negotiation but he brought a large bird as one member of the outfit only slightly exaggerated there's only one way to kill an emu shoot him through the back of the head when his mouth is closed or through the front of his mouth when his mouth is open that's how hard it is that's more than one way i guess you're right yeah there's only one way to kill an emu two ways after this disappointing battle the human side of the war decided they needed a new tactic the men mounted one of their machine guns on the back of a truck so o'halloran could fire at the birds while giving chase however since they weren't driving on paved roads but instead in the literal outback o'halloran spent the entire ride holding on to the bucking truck for dear life failing to even fire a single shot the war was tilting surprisingly in the emu's favor sounds like a real rambo here i love the contrast rambozo as meredith wrote in an official report if we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world they could face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks apart from their physical superiority the press even began to suspect the emus were better strategists than the australian army writing quote the emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they usually are considered to be each mob has its leader always an enormous black plumed bird standing fully six feet high who keeps watch while his fellows busy themselves with the wheat but the first suspicious sign he gives a signal and dozens of heads stretch up out of the crop a few birds will take fright starting a headlong stampede for the scrub so who are you guys rooting for here i'm room for the emus yeah you gotta gotta go with the humans man what i'm just kidding oh okay of course i'm running for the emu the thing is people started starving before the emus came in because the government was like we don't want to pay as much as we promised and now they're like we'll blame all of this on the emus yeah and it's like you're still the first domino to fall how about you take a look at capitalism how about you take the in the mirror by november 8th the men had used 25 percent of their bullets 2500 rounds but only brought down somewhere between 50 and 200 emus around this time the rest of the country was beginning to hear about the debacle in the brush and they wanted answers one politician sarcastically asked whether the men participating in this war were going to get a medal a western australia politician a.e green replied that if anyone gets a medal it should be the emus who quote have won every round so far that's good meredith mcmurray and o'halloran withdrew from their campaign and submitted a report newspapers mocked their efforts and public sentiment was not with the soldier settlers but with the birds this was exacerbated by the footage gathered during the campaign shown in movie theater news reels of emus desperately trying to evade machine gun fire i mentioned that at the beginning i just don't see what the plan was here like like they thought that it was going to be like oh we're taking care of this we're going to get you fed i'm surprised they didn't send people out to every local theater with wheat to throw it at the audience after they shoot the birds with the machine goods like a 4d experience yeah like a 4d experience i don't really like those though because they usually get me wet why not hang on in that hang on you sickos though plenty of folks wanted this expedition to stop in his report meredith communicated how dire the situation was writing quote the damage done by these birds has to be seen to be believed over large areas the crops are completely flattened optimistically meredith concluded his report with the one undisputed piece of good news his unit hadn't suffered any casualties yeah the casualty they would experience is the guy falling off the truck yeah you never want a casualty to your unit okay what happened to meredith mcmurray and o'halloran after the report hey they were thrown in jail b they refused to shoot at any more birds or c they were told to get back out there oh god all right i don't like this answer but i do think this is what happened okay i'm gonna go c for more carcasses i'm sorry more carcasses and kate c for see out there and i love to see my sea dogs out there okay uh points to both of you yes after meredith goosed the kill numbers in his report likely taking liberties with the number of emus killed the australian government basically shrugged said well what else are we gonna do and sent the boys back out to give those birds another taste of emunation i do love the idea of b though that they're like i can't believe you shot all these birds you don't do that again and they're like fair enough i don't know just imagining someone being tried for murder and he was like okay won't do it again you know what i didn't know i didn't know now this second campaign went a bit better for the human side of the skirmish but on december 10th the emu war was called off for good now it's impossible to know how many emus died but for his final report meredith settled on the nice round number of 2500. hey why not oh what you gonna go out there and count the maggot riddled emu carcasses rotting in the sun i didn't think so jesus christ depends who's asking you would do it if a real hunk asked you it depends okay okay cool he wants to take me out to count maggot covered email carcasses and i can't say no to talk about romance he said it so sweetly of course after meredith and his men withdrew the soldier settlers were still faced with the twin problems of emus and economics the farmers thanked the machine gun crew for trying then continued to refuse to load their grain until the government guarantees them a price yeah you know you got to stick to your guns was that intentional no not really effortless thanks even with that guarantee however many farmers knew they wouldn't survive out there for long and so many of them abandoned their land throughout the rest of the 30s those who stayed needed to deal with the emus and in 1934 the government began providing ammunition to the soldier settlers themselves these were after all former military men this strategy proved to be much more effective than the machine guns with over 57 000 birds killed in six months after a bounty was introduced after world war ii more than 284 000 emus were killed between 1945 and 1960. that's a lot of emu killings wait there was a bounty yeah they were like all right we'll start paying you if you kill these birds so how did you prove you killed the bird did you have to cut off its head and you just had a bunch of pear-shaped emu heads i guess so yeah you probably just rolled into town with a nice little wheelbarrow full of emu heads make it into a necklace yeah just a bunch of hair what a stupid meat cute just like oh sorry you dropped your head and they're like do i know you oh man the beginning of west world you can keep it thanks i'm gonna put it on a necklace today the emu population in australia is thankfully stable estimated to be between 600 and 700 thousand birds an emu is featured prominently on the nation's coat of arms just as it was in 1932 when australia decided to murder them all hey why couldn't they just leave the emus alone that's a great question ryan let's let them be emus let them be maybe don't build your houses in your emus leave them beam you that's what i say well that concludes our history lesson i'm going to go tally the scores to see who receives the coveted cup and the title of history master while i do that please enjoy the special gentle performance from a teeny tiny piece of wheat wow how wonderful oh well whoever wins i'm sure they deserved it ryan this is not a good look on you man [Applause] oh my god [Music] pretty good this is the cutest thing i've ever seen it's pretty good one day i hope to be your bread every day [Music] oh look at this boys we got a live one here oh what oh you want me to sing a song huh all right [Music] west of nowhere they got a golden crop they tend to grow there well it's a sweet district a six foot bird could ever eat yum yum we'll risk our next for a couple more pets of your worthless wheat [Music] [Music] then come right back try and kill me i dare you do it do it do it shoot us pursue us you can drive a truck rug through us riddle us with bullets if we stuff our skinny gullets [Music] kill my family [Applause] [Music] plunder until we're six feet down under one more time for all our dead roaring friends shoot us pursue us you can drive a truck right through us but just make sure you [Music] [Applause] wow holy crap good great whoa oh we keep having people get murdered on stage lately hey you know what sometimes art hurts yeah i guess so ripped to that little guy he was very sweet and may he enjoy deteriorating in the enzymes of that emu's belly he died for a cause really sweet send off well anyway we've tallied the points and put the jellies into our complex victory algorithm and kate peterman you are our history master put it there come grab your trophy okay oh man ryan a valiant effort today the algorithm it seemed to twitch a little so i think you're making headway there i mean it looks right on you you gotta love the attitude well kate peterman thank you as always for gracing us with your presents ryan thank you for trying and i mean that this time and everybody else thank you for watching puppet history where the details are always a little fuzzy we'll see you next week [Music] hey folks you know outside of the confines of this buttoned-up educational program i rarely talk candidly but well i'd like to thank you for watching the first episode of puppet history season four what a hoot plenty more where that came from this season but all pleasantries aside we here at puppet history value your feedback and rest assured we've heard you loud and clear we're here for the history of the world not the history of a little blue man's straight-up freaky relationship with a primordial vindictive trickster born from elemental chaos and that's fair lore is confusing and often sloppy so that's why you'll have noticed not a lick of genie talk in today's episode that's right read my sticky little lips there will be no lore on this season of puppet history just guests jelly beans and funny little songs sung by anthropomorphic objects who got brought to life who cares how no genie talk whatsoever in fact i took out a restraining order on him so now he can't even track me down and force me to unwish my wishes so he can eat screws for all i care oh well there i go again sometimes i just can't help myself but the big takeaway here at the end of this season everything will be precisely as it was in this very moment guaranteed [Music] we'll see you next the week drive a truck ride through riddle us with bullets stop by skinny garlits pop a slug right in my skull until my belly's full

Channel: Watcher

Views: 2,534,187

Keywords: History, Puppet history, shane madej, ryan bergara, shane and ryan, the professor, funny, trivia, educational, musical, buzzfeed unsolved, ruining history, buzzfeed, musical history, weird history, game show, puppets, puppetry, quiz, quiz show, bizarre history, funny history, songs, kate peterman, emu, birds

Id: U51jj6-K0so

Length: 34min 47sec (2087 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021