Ovi History

How Australia lost a war to flightless birds and found a national fable. The battlefield was the parched wheatbelt of Western Australia, a land of saltbush and sorrow. The enemy was Dromaius novaehollandiae, the emu, standing six feet tall, weighing as much as a soldier’s kit, and capable of outrunning a horse. Twenty thousand of them had descended upon the newly cleared farmland like a feathered plague, devouring wheat that returning Great War veterans had staked their futures on. When fences