ema

The English word 'emu' for the large flightless bird native to Australia (Dromaius novaehollandiae) comes from Portuguese ema, a term used by Portuguese sailors to designate large flightless birds they encountered on their voyages. The original Portuguese ema referred to the rhea — the large South American flightless bird — and possibly the cassowary of Southeast Asia and New Guinea. The ultimate origin of the Portuguese ema is obscure; it may derive from an Arabic or African trade language term for a large bird, possibly connected to the Arabic نعامة (naʿāma, ostrich), or it may be a Portuguese coinage. When Portuguese and Dutch sailors encountered the Australian bird in the seventeenth century, they applied an existing term from their vocabulary of large flightless birds rather than coining a new one.

The bird now called the emu was first encountered by European explorers on the Australian mainland. The Dutch ship Duyfken (1606) and Willem Janszoon's expedition made the first recorded European contact with the Australian continent, but the emu's name in European sources appears most clearly in early English colonial records. The Portuguese explorer Pedro Fernandes de Queirós may have observed emus on an island in the Pacific in 1605, and the bird appears in Dutch East India Company records in the early seventeenth century. By the time the British established their colony at Sydney Cove in 1788, 'emu' was already the standard English term — borrowed from Portuguese through the general vocabulary of European Indian Ocean and Pacific exploration.

The emu is the second-largest living bird by height (after the ostrich) and the largest bird native to Australia, standing up to two meters tall and weighing up to 60 kilograms. It cannot fly — its wings are vestigial, reduced to small stumps hidden under its shaggy brown feathers — but it can run at speeds of up to 48 kilometers per hour and swim competently. The emu's role in Australian ecology is extensive: it disperses seeds across vast distances, with gut passage times of up to three days and migrations that can cover hundreds of kilometers; it has been calculated that some plant species in inland Australia may depend almost entirely on emu dispersal. Aboriginal Australians had complex relationships with the emu — it appears in Dreamtime stories, its fat was used medicinally, and its tracks are represented in rock art — but Aboriginal names for the bird (such as murawung in Noongar) were not adopted into English.

The 'Emu War' of 1932 gave the bird an unlikely prominence in military history. The Australian government deployed soldiers with Lewis guns to control a population of approximately 20,000 emus that were destroying wheat crops in Western Australia. The campaign was, by any measure, a failure: the emus proved difficult to kill in useful numbers, scattered when fired upon, and seemed to sustain gunfire with remarkable indifference. The ornithologist and soldier Major G.P.W. Meredith, who led the campaign, observed that '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.' The Emu War became an Australian national joke — one of the few recorded instances of a military force decisively losing to birds — and it is now a well-documented case study in ecological management and the unintended consequences of settlement agriculture.