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Today we're starting the new year with a look back on two of our favorite stories from 2025.
00:02:15
That's right. We're taking two of our listener favorite stories and combining them into a best of the year quilt episode.
00:02:21
So Karen's going to kick things off with the story of Violet Jessup, the queen of sinking ships.
00:02:25
And Georgia is going to take us through the unforgettable tale of Australia's great emu war.
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That's right. Right here on this true crime podcast. You're going to love it. That's right.
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So enjoy this best of the year quilt episode and happy new year. Yeah. Let's make 2026 a real one.
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Goodbye. We're going to go to a place we've been to before that I've actually forced you to come to twice before, but I need to go back and you'll see why. Okay. So it's 2 a.m.
00:06:44
on April 15th, 1912. Okay. Get a sense of what we're about to do. Nope. we're in the middle of the North Atlantic
00:06:52
where the Titanic is sinking. Motherfucker. Yeah. The Titanic? We're going back to the Titanic.
00:06:58
You love that guy. I love the Titanic. You love that vessel. A lot of stuff happened on that vessel
00:07:04
that I want to tell you about. It's funny that you say 2012 and I'm in the middle of the night
00:07:08
and I'm like, uh, I don't know. 1912. What did I say? 2012. That was a bad year too, so.
00:07:14
2012 was rough. I fully agree. I love your Titanic stories. it's just so funny. Yeah.
00:07:22
Here's the thing about me and the Titanic. I love to talk about the people that made it off of the Titanic.
00:07:28
Yeah. It's pretty an amazing topic. Yeah. I have no interest to go down and look at the Titanic.
00:07:33
No. A lot of people want to. I think photos are cool, but they never, they never give you what you want,
00:07:39
you know? They don't put you there. They don't put you there. Maybe like a dish is so exciting,
00:07:44
but like that's about it. Yeah. And it's got all the weird algae on it, that dish.
00:07:50
So much algae. And a couple snails. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Here we're going to 1912. Everything is snail-free.
00:07:57
Okay. The Titanic is sinking, and when it finally disappears under the water, it will take the lives of more than 1,500 people with it.
00:08:05
There will be around 700 survivors. The survivors we've talked about on this show,
00:08:10
episode 411, which was entitled Eight Years, One Episode, that's when I talked about the unsinkable Molly Brown.
00:08:17
They actually called her Margaret Brown, but everyone knows her as the unsinkable Molly Brown.
00:08:21
She makes it onto lifeboat six and she spends her time on that lifeboat rallying the terrified passengers
00:08:28
and urging them to keep rowing. When the officer in charge starts to spiral in the midst of all the terror
00:08:35
of what's going on around them, Molly threatens to throw them overboard. It's great for morale.
00:08:40
Everybody keeps going. They survive. Got it, girl. At the same moment that she's doing that over on Lifeboat 6,
00:08:46
the Titanic's baker, Charles Jocken, you might remember, he was the drunk one. Oh, yes.
00:08:51
He was the drunk one. Everyone was shit-faced on that. You know that band was barely able to, like,
00:08:58
keep the bow to the strings. Oh, my God. So much good champagne. If you want to hear me talk about Charles Jocken,
00:09:04
it's episode 348. It's called Old Biscuit. And we learn on that one that basically,
00:09:10
the thing that saved Charles Jocken's life, they think, is that he got super shit-faced.
00:09:16
As the ship sank, he jumped up onto the railing and rode it down as the ship was going into the
00:09:23
water. Then he tread water in 28-degree waves for several hours and lived. And it's like,
00:09:34
defy science. And they think it's because the liquor that was in his system just kept his body
00:09:39
warm, almost like tricked him into being warm. That's why I drink is just to stay warm. Same.
00:09:44
Don't tell anybody. We got to stay warm, guys, on this fucking Titanic that we're on. Yeah.
00:09:50
So when Charles Jocken is finally rescued, and we talked about this on that episode,
00:09:55
but I still love this. He has two swollen feet and that's it. That's the only thing wrong with
00:10:01
that man who tread water in 28 degree ocean for hours until he got rescued. I mean, I wake up in
00:10:07
my bed in worse shape. Two swollen feet? I wish that's funny. Okay, so what character is that?
00:10:14
So some of our favorites, but today I'm going to tell you about your new favorite Titanic survivor.
00:10:19
She's a third Titanic survivor whose story is more unbelievable than the first two put together.
00:10:26
Throughout this woman's life, she'll be involved in not one, not two, but three historic maritime
00:10:32
disasters. The sinking of the Titanic arguably is not even the worst one for her. Some people
00:10:39
call her the queen of the sinking ships. This is the story of stewardess Violet Jessup.
00:10:44
Yes. So main sources that Maren used for the story are Violet's memoir entitled Titanic Survivor,
00:10:51
the Memoirs of Violet Jessup, comma, stewardess. She fucking worked on the Titanic.
00:10:57
And also a National Geographic article by journalist David Kindy entitled, She Survived the Titanic, But It Wasn't the Only Time She Faced Death at Sea.
00:11:08
And the rest of the sources are in our show notes. Okay. We start the story 25 years before the Titanic sinks with an Irish Catholic couple from Dublin
00:11:17
named William and Kelly Jessup. They have immigrated to South America, and now they have a sheep farm in Argentina.
00:11:24
and in 1887 they welcome their first child, Violet. They will have eight more children in the coming years.
00:11:34
Only six will survive childhood. So this was the horrible infant mortality situation
00:11:39
of the turn of the 1920th century. So Violet herself nearly dies of tuberculosis when she's little.
00:11:49
She is sick for weeks and later she'll describe this time as, quote a dim awareness of being plunged into a very hot bath then wrapped in cold wet sheets followed by long periods of nothingness Yikes So scary and sad for a child And speaking of her coughing fits are so intense at this time that quote
00:12:09
blood seemed to be on everything. And her eventual recovery from this is said to be miraculous.
00:12:16
So normally, Violet's day-to-day involves helping her family. She's the oldest sister in a big family, which means she's doing cooking, cleaning, taking care of her younger siblings, the whole nine.
00:12:28
Then in 1903, when Violet is 16 years old, her father William dies while undergoing some kind of a surgery.
00:12:36
It's sudden. It's shocking. The loss hits Violet especially hard. She was her father's favorite child.
00:12:42
And she will later write, quote, In my grief, I was tongue-tied and stunned. Whenever I tried to speak, I discovered I had lost my voice completely.
00:12:51
So sad. But of course, the family has no time to mourn because now Violet's mother, Kelly, is a widow with six kids
00:12:59
who has to find a way to support the family. So she moves the family back to Europe where they settle in England
00:13:06
and Kelly gets to work on ocean liners sailing between the UK and America. She's hired as a stewardess,
00:13:13
and that means she's doing things like cleaning cabins, serving meals, and even some light nursing duties.
00:13:19
And while she's at sea, Violet is left to raise her siblings by herself. Wait, her mom left to do that?
00:13:26
Yep. Okay. And she's home with the five other kids. Okay. And the youngest is an infant.
00:13:33
Oh, no. So they were just make and do. Yeah. For the next several years, Violet's basically a stay-at-home mom
00:13:40
dreaming about the day her mother will come home for good. And when she does, Violet plans that she
00:13:46
will join the convent. But that dream never pans out because instead in 1908, when Violet is around
00:13:53
21 years old, her mother gets very sick and it's serious enough that she has to stop working.
00:13:59
So to keep food on the family table, Violet again steps up for the family. And even though she does
00:14:05
not like the ocean, she does not know how to swim, and she's kind of freaked out by the vast
00:14:10
openness of the sea, she starts looking for stewardess work. She knows it's a good job.
00:14:17
She can get paid well. Her mom can tell her how to do it. And she not only has years of
00:14:22
caregiving experience raising her brothers and sisters, she's fluent in Spanish from having been
00:14:27
raised in Argentina. But at the time, she struggles to get work as a stewardess, partly because she's
00:14:33
so young, much younger than most of the stewardesses who are working at the time. But also,
00:14:38
Violet is very beautiful, which works against her because in a job like that, you're supposed
00:14:43
to blend in and just be part of the wallpaper, right? And whether she wants to or not, Violet
00:14:49
does not blend in. I get it. Nice. Okay, okay. I've been through it. I feel that. I've never
00:14:56
been a stewardess for that very reason on the Titanic. So after she gets interviewed a couple
00:15:02
times and gets rejected. She starts dressing down for the interviews. She stops wearing makeup
00:15:07
altogether, and it works. She ends up landing one job after another, and by 1911, 24-year-old Violet
00:15:14
is hired by the White Star Line to work aboard the RMS Olympic. So at the time, the RMS Olympic
00:15:21
is the largest passenger ship in the world. It's completely state-of-the-art. It has electric
00:15:26
elevators, Turkish baths, a swimming pool, and ornate features like crystal chandeliers and
00:15:32
marble statues and plush velvet furniture. Amazing. They really went all out. It was like
00:15:38
the Empire State Building on the sea. Yeah. Not that tall. But anyhow, Violet isn't all that
00:15:45
impressed. She's just there for the money. And that's what keeps her going when she has the
00:15:50
experience that she really doesn't like, which is the passengers treating her like their servant.
00:15:56
which happens often, and rich male passengers leer at her, they proposition her, some even
00:16:02
propose like the second they meet her, while the women passengers can be extremely cutting,
00:16:08
very condescending. Later on, Violet will write, quote, I often reflected that there must be some
00:16:14
quality in a sea trip that affects character, or maybe its enforced propinquity emphasizes how
00:16:21
awful normal folk can become, mean, paltry, and selfish to a degree when they are in the position
00:16:27
of indiscriminate power. It's like what happens on the Titanic stays in the Titanic. Yeah. And also
00:16:34
it's like, just because we're stuck on this boat together doesn't mean I got to do everything you
00:16:38
say. Yeah. Maren made a note to me, propinquity means physical closeness or nearness. Thank you.
00:16:44
And then she was like, I've never heard this word before. Thank you again. Propinquity. Propinquity.
00:16:49
It's your continual propinquity that causes the problem for me. Say it in ASMR. If you have a tendency toward propinquity, toward tapping your nails on stuff, that's misused.
00:17:02
Okay, so now it's September 1911. Violet's been working as a crew member on the Olympic for months.
00:17:09
And then one night, the boat she's on, the Olympic, collides with a British warship called the Hawk off the coast of the Isle of Wight.
00:17:17
So the Hawk is this little, it's like a sixth of the size of the Olympic, and it's actually
00:17:24
specifically built to ram and sink enemy vessels. So it's very strong. The two boats collide and the
00:17:32
Hawk nearly capsizes, but it still manages to leave a 40-foot gash along the side of the Olympic.
00:17:39
Water rushes into the bottom of the ship, and it actually downs a propeller. And of course,
00:17:44
from her room, Violet hears and feels this horrible impact, although no one's injured or killed from
00:17:51
this crash and the ships aren very far from land And even with that propeller down the Olympic is able to just hobble back to port so no one has to evacuate on lifeboats So comparatively this is probably the tamest of all the horrible ship accidents that Violet is involved in
00:18:11
She gets reassigned to another White Star line ship, and it is the company's brand new luxury ocean liner that's gearing up for its maiden voyage.
00:18:19
It is the Titanic. Okay. So we're back on the North Atlantic just before midnight on April 14th.
00:18:27
Violet is in her quarters. She is getting ready for bed after being a stewardess all day on the Titanic.
00:18:33
Oh, the feet. The feet pain. Just the feet, the work, the, um, over here. Can you get me a roll?
00:18:40
Yeah. Snap, snap. Snap, snap, roll. So Violet's back in her quarters. She's holding a piece of paper that has a handwritten prayer on it.
00:18:48
and it's one that's supposed to protect her from fire and water, which is very Catholic.
00:18:55
We have saints. They do very specific things for very specific people. I guess there's a fire and
00:19:01
water saint. I'll look up who it is later. And as all of that is going on, Violet hears a huge crash
00:19:08
followed by a, quote, low, rending, crunching, ripping sound. So, of course, it's a scary thing
00:19:16
for her to experience. But like everyone else on board, they've been told time and again that the
00:19:21
Titanic is unsinkable. So no one's panicking. She certainly is not. But eventually, a shell-shocked
00:19:28
Violet is called up to the deck. This will be her very last assignment on the Titanic. She's told
00:19:33
to translate evacuation instructions for the Spanish-speaking passengers and then to assist
00:19:39
women and children getting on the lifeboats. So that's what she does until she herself is loaded
00:19:45
onto lifeboat 16. Moments before her group is lowered into the ocean, an officer rushes over
00:19:52
and says to Violet, quote, here, Miss Jessup, look after this, and then basically
00:19:58
hands her a baby girl. The baby had been left alone on deck. And so the officer just basically made
00:20:05
the hasty decision to grab this baby and throw it to Violet for safekeeping. So as their boat is lowered
00:20:12
some 60 feet in the dark, to the freezing cold ocean below with icy wind whipping at their faces
00:20:19
like, quote, a knife in its penetrating coldness. Violet is trying to soothe this baby girl.
00:20:27
But the lifeboat hits the water hard. You don't think about that part of it where it's like, yes, you're being saved in a way.
00:20:33
Yeah. But off of a sinking ship. Right. Into. In a hurry. The North Sea. Yeah. That we've all seen TikToks about.
00:20:43
Is it the North Sea? Well, the North Atlantic, yeah. So the baby starts crying when the lifeboat hits the water.
00:20:49
Again, just quick reminder, Violet does not know how to swim. And she's, of course, terrified herself.
00:20:54
But she focuses on the baby. She pulls the baby to her chest, hoping to keep her warm.
00:21:00
And she just watches as the Titanic sinks into blackness. Holy shit. And here's how Violet will later describe this moment.
00:21:07
She says, quote, I watched the Titanic give a lurch forward. one of the huge funnels toppled off like a cardboard model falling into the sea with a
00:21:17
fearful roar a few cries came to us across the water then silence as the ship seemed to right
00:21:23
itself like a hurt animal with a broken back she settled for a few minutes but one more deck of
00:21:29
lighted ports disappeared then she went down by the head and a thundering roar of underwater
00:21:36
explosions, our proud ship, our beautiful Titanic, gone to her doom. God, what a sight. And you're
00:21:44
like, however many feet away you could get away. Totally. Looking at that. I don't like it. It's
00:21:50
too big and it's too vast. I'm on Violet's side. I don't like it. That's why I need to keep talking.
00:21:57
Okay, I get it. So for the next several hours, as traumatized Titanic survivors wait to be rescued,
00:22:03
Violet clings to this baby, as you would. At one point, she worries that both she and the infant
00:22:09
are going to freeze to death in lifeboat 16. And then the rescue ship, the SS Carpathia,
00:22:15
shows up around 4 a.m. So it's like about two hours. Did we ever have the discussion about like the magnets?
00:22:23
How do they work? How do they work? How do they maybe affect the Titanic's scouting system?
00:22:30
Yeah. Do we talk about that in any of these? I don't think so. Okay. Do you want to throw some theories out?
00:22:34
I'll do it another thing. Have you been listening to RFK's podcast? What's happening?
00:22:39
It's all magnets. It's all magnets. You think something interfered and that's how it drove into the iceberg.
00:22:45
Yes, but a natural phenomenon interfered and that, yeah, that's why. Some like Bermuda Triangle stuff.
00:22:50
Exactly. So if you know what I'm talking about, send me the article that I read about.
00:22:55
Please, because I don't remember. If you know what we're talking about and you're in the North Atlantic right now.
00:22:59
Tell me. Tell me what I'm talking about. Tell me. Was this just an episode of Below Deck and I'm totally fucking wrong?
00:23:06
It could be. I slept with him because of the magnets. They drew me toward his cabin.
00:23:11
His dick is the Bermuda Triangle. It's not my fault that the draw is so strong. It's like two cartoon magnets pulling Wile E. Coyote off a cliff.
00:23:21
Dick was the lifeboat. Okay, stop it. Stop it. This is a serious podcast. I was just talking about a baby.
00:23:27
Okay. You're playing this for your mom and now she's horrified. Okay. We're going to do a quote from Violet about the moment that she and the baby are saved.
00:23:35
Okay, ready? Quote, I was still clutching the baby against my hard cork life belt when a woman leaped at me and grabbed the baby and rushed off with it.
00:23:45
Hey. It appeared that she put it down on the deck of the Titanic while she went off to fetch something, and when she came back, the baby had gone.
00:23:54
I was too frozen and numb to think it strange that this woman had not stopped to say thank you.
00:24:00
end quote. Oh, so the mom came and claimed her baby. The mom was like, you have my baby
00:24:04
that's my baby. Okay, well everyone's panicking so. And nobody would blame. She thought
00:24:08
she lost the baby. Totally. Entirely and there's a lady that has the baby. But also like, babies all look the same
00:24:14
to me. Like, how do you know it's your baby? And act the same. Like such babies. The attitudes.
00:24:20
Years later, Violet will receive a very short phone call from a woman claiming to be that baby.
00:24:26
Oh, the baby. The baby called her. Fuck. Hello, it's a baby. Call her ID. It's the baby. That baby. That baby. Your
00:24:36
favorite baby. The Titanic baby. From the North Atlantic. Some people say that that call was either
00:24:42
a hoax or it wasn't really. Violet seemed to believe she really was the caller. Sure. Why not?
00:24:48
So the Carpathia spends four hours pulling Titanic survivors from their lifeboats.
00:24:54
Ultimately, they deliver around 700 people to safety in the New York Harbor. I thought they went to Canada.
00:25:01
I think they took the dead bodies to Canada. Oh. That's where the big morgue was.
00:25:05
Okay. But, sorry, that's just what it said here, so you could be right. Okay. That's probably below deck.
00:25:10
Okay. That's below deck Newfoundland. From there, Violet catches a ship back to England,
00:25:16
and not two weeks later, she signs back up to go out to sea to work as a stewardess once again.
00:25:22
Because, like, what are the chances? right? I'm sure. And she's kind of like, this is a real skill. She probably can make good money
00:25:30
comparatively. And she needs the money. It's not like she can take time off. No. She can't go find
00:25:36
herself and do a year abroad. Do you think there was a Titanic survivor fund or something? No,
00:25:40
they didn't do that. I mean, you would think something. But anyway, she's kind of like all
00:25:46
business, which, sorry, I do love that. Yeah. We're just like, hey, look. It's Irish, man.
00:25:51
it really is it's Irish Catholic because it's like right I'll get my reward later right I'll
00:25:57
go back on to the thing that tried to kill me last two times okay she will say quote I knew that if I
00:26:04
meant to continue my sea life I would have to return at once otherwise I would lose my nerve
00:26:09
for I had no love for it but I needed the work girl yeah intense so Violet will later write about
00:26:16
how the sinking of the Titanic changes her entire perspective on life and strengthens her already
00:26:21
very deep faith. What it does not do is change how much she hates being at the beck and call
00:26:26
of rich travelers. There's no faith strong enough to get you over rich people snapping their fingers
00:26:33
at you. Absolutely not. Violet writes on that topic, quote, I wanted the quietness of happy
00:26:38
contentment, not the hectic turmoil of riches, which sapped simplicity and spontaneous kindness
00:26:43
out of people. I wanted desperately to shut out the encroachment of sea life on my inner self,
00:26:49
to retain something I feared I was losing, a kind of action that's performed for the love of pleasing
00:26:55
and not for gain. I had gained one thing. I learned how to look very deeply into people
00:27:00
and to value them for what I found. Famous names and possessions no longer moved me.
00:27:06
I was more confident when confronted by some powerful woman whose cold eyes, as I served her breakfast might once have shattered me.
00:27:14
She's literally talking about my career. But each day it was more difficult to be my simple self,
00:27:22
to ignore the pettiness, artificiality, and frothy gaiety that encompassed a stewardess's life on board a ship.
00:27:30
I fucking totally hear that. Yeah. As an ex-waitress, I fucking hear it. Come on.
00:27:36
Like, entitled motherfuckers. On vacation being like, you make my vacation go. So it's the literal opposite of a vacation for you.
00:27:45
You are here to serve me. And that's your purpose. Snap, snap, snap. Fuck you. So now it's 1914 and World War I begins.
00:27:56
Heard of it. Violet is 27. And as we all do at age 27, she decides to pivot. So what she does is become a war nurse.
00:28:04
Definitely. That's what you did. Yeah. You got to. So she's in hospitals both on land and at sea.
00:28:11
Oh, honey. She can't stop. In late 1916, she's assigned work on the Britannic, which is the third of the White Star Line's signature luxury vessels,
00:28:21
this sister ship to the Olympic and to the Titanic. Why don't they know when to quit or like change the name of the company?
00:28:28
With this assignment, Violet will have worked on all three of the White Star Line luxury ships.
00:28:34
There can't be a lot of them. No, I bet they gave her a nice pocket watch for it.
00:28:38
So during the war, the Britannic is repurposed into a hospital ship. And on November 21st, 1916, it's moving through the Aegean Sea on the way to the battlefields in Turkey to treat wounded soldiers there.
00:28:51
So they go pick up all the wounded soldiers and take them back away from all the war.
00:28:57
So at a little after 9 a.m., Violet has just left Mass Church and she's now quietly eating her breakfast.
00:29:05
You mean temple? Yes. Oh, do I have to translate it for you? Yeah, thank you. She's eating breakfast post-mass.
00:29:11
Post-mass and not Massachusetts. And her breakfast is interrupted by a loud boom.
00:29:16
We're doing it again. For years, the cause of the blast will be unclear. But today in 2025, it's believed that the Britannic hit a mine.
00:29:26
No way. Yeah. So the ship shakes violently, begins to sink. Violet yawns checks her watch
00:29:35
looks around Is there a baby? Does anyone want to give me a baby? Stop crying It's not that big of a deal
00:29:40
I've seen worse Does anybody have a baby? I'll take the babies Hand the babies over here please
00:29:47
She's finishing her English muffin Okay Officers immediately start moving people
00:29:53
onto lifeboats but Violet runs back to her room to get a prayer book and a toothbrush Honey Which is something she sorely missed after surviving the Titanic sinking A friend had jokingly told Violet to quote
00:30:06
never undertake another disaster without first making sure of your toothbrush. That's how much she complained about not being able to brush her teeth
00:30:14
after surviving the sinking of the Titanic. How much were toothbrushes back then?
00:30:18
And then money, what did the toothbrush cost? I think she was just like, it was no one's priority to get me a toothbrush after we got
00:30:26
back to land. And so she's like, never again. Okay. All right. Girl. Seems like you could use
00:30:31
your finger like we all did when we crashed at a dude's house in our 20s. So now Violet's loaded onto a crowded lifeboat. This is, if you are the kind of person that
00:30:43
doesn't understand why you listen to true crime podcasts because they're upsetting,
00:30:48
this part might upset you. Oh, okay. Got it. This is a very upsetting part, especially if you have ocean issues.
00:30:54
Okay. Or you're on a boat right now. Or you're on a boat right now. So they're slowly being lowered into the water,
00:31:00
which is not a smooth journey. The ship starts tilting. The lifeboat gets snagged on an open porthole.
00:31:06
It almost flips upside down, but the people on the lifeboat managed to get it uncaught.
00:31:12
Now it's scraping down the side of the Britannic as it's lowered. At one point, the ship takes another hard tilt, and the lifeboat goes out and swings into the ship's green hospital band, which is made of glass.
00:31:27
So it's a hospital ship. The green band around it is actually made of glass. I didn't know that.
00:31:33
So there's like a red cross up here, red cross back there. That's so you know, hey, don't bomb this ship.
00:31:39
Can we get canvas? Yeah. There's a shortage of canvas. I don't know who planned that, but they smash into it and glass shatters and Violet and the other people on the lifeboat are sprayed with shards of glass.
00:31:52
All the while, Violet is looking down at the water. She can see two lifeboats are already down there.
00:31:58
And the people who are on those lifeboats are doing everything they can to row away from the ship itself.
00:32:05
but the captain is still trying to move the Britannic towards shallower waters and he has not turned off the ship's propeller.
00:32:13
Oh, no. Yes. No. The propeller is now sucking the evacuees in their lifeboats toward the ship.
00:32:23
Violet watches as the worst case scenario plays out in front of her. One of the lifeboats gets sucked into the ship's blades
00:32:30
and the boat and all of the people on it are hacked to pieces and the water then turns red with blood.
00:32:38
As they're dangling over the same water they're supposed to go down into. Oh, no.
00:32:43
Violet will later say, quote, I gave that foolish, nervous laugh, as people sometimes do
00:32:49
when faced with an unpleasant discovery and a doubtful alternative. That's a beautiful way of putting,
00:32:56
oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. Holy fuck. Holy fuck. Just sitting there looking down.
00:33:02
Oh, my God. Violet's lifeboat is finally dropped into the same water, almost on cue.
00:33:07
Everyone except for Violet and one other man jump out of the boat and into the sea.
00:33:13
Violet will later write about this, quote, Not a word, not a shout was heard, just hundreds of men fleeing into the sea as if from an enemy in pursuit.
00:33:22
It was extraordinary to find myself in the space of a few minutes, almost the only occupant of the boat.
00:33:28
I turned around to see the reason for this exodus And to my horror Saw the Britannic's huge propellers
00:33:36
Churning and mincing up everything near them Men, boats, and everything Were just one ghastly whirl
00:33:44
Oh man, dude, shut it off So she turns around to see why everyone's jumping off the boat
00:33:49
And then when she turns back The one guy that was left also jumps off the boat Cool
00:33:53
It's so horrible She can't swim Right, that's right It's not an option and yet she knows if she stays on this boat,
00:34:01
she's going into that propeller. So she flings herself into the water, kicking and paddling for her life
00:34:06
and it is the very first time her whole body and her head are underwater like that.
00:34:12
I mean, I'm sure she took baths before, but like never. She has never. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:34:17
She's immediately jerked around by the power of these propellers. Yeah, they just suck you right in.
00:34:22
Yes, you're gonna go where that water takes you. Her head is hit onto the ship's keel,
00:34:27
which is the bottom spine, twice. She's pulled down and her head is knocked into the keel twice.
00:34:33
She will later write, quote, my brain shook like a solid body in a bottle of liquid.
00:34:38
Oh, my God. At the same time, the keel is also blocking Violet from being able to come back up and surface.
00:34:44
So she is under there about to drown. She says, quote, suddenly some twist of fancy made me see,
00:34:51
even then, underwater, the humor of my situation. Oh, my honey. And I chuckled. That was very nearly my undoing,
00:34:59
for I swallowed what seemed like gallons of water and everything that was in it.
00:35:03
I love her. I love her. Like, how much fun was she to have a drink with? Because she's like, you gotta be fucking—
00:35:09
This is fucking— Someone hand me a baby down here. Can you believe it? Miraculously, this is when the captain finally cuts the ship's engine.
00:35:17
Thanks, guy. The propellers stop, and now Violet's adrenaline kicks in. Yes, she's injured.
00:35:23
It is a head injury. but somehow she forces her way to the surface and finds a life vest floating nearby.
00:35:30
She holds onto that life vest. She keeps her head above water and she swims past dismembered corpses
00:35:37
and dangerous debris from the chopped up lifeboats. Dude. Horror show. Yeah. This is the worst one.
00:35:46
While the Britannic continues sinking behind her, Violet is far enough away. She gets far enough away.
00:35:52
And when she does, she turns around and she watches it go down Quote she says all the deck machinery fell into the sea like child toys Then she took a fearful plunge her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until with a final
00:36:07
roar, she disappeared into the depths, the noise of her going resounding through the water with an
00:36:13
undreamt of violence. Wow. You just don't want to be that close to these gigantic ships when they
00:36:19
sink. Like really, you want to be at home. Far, far away. At home with your eight brothers and
00:36:24
sisters. So Violet's out there bobbing in the water, clinging to the life vest until a motorboat
00:36:30
approaches and pulls her up to safety. She then realizes for the first time that her leg has been
00:36:36
slashed and her head is, quote, battered almost to a pulp. Doctors are amazed by how mobile and
00:36:43
alert Violet is. When she sees a Britannic doctor that she'd sat beside at mass earlier that morning,
00:36:50
he tells her, quote, I know what saved you today, young lady. English muffin. Did you hear the way I choked on the finishing that sentence where I'm like,
00:37:00
oh, wait, he means God. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. What did she think about this?
00:37:05
I don't know. I wasn't really thinking. I was like, this is a highly Catholic church
00:37:09
sponsored episode. It truly is. The Britannic will sink in just under 55 minutes.
00:37:16
It took the Titanic two hours and 40 minutes to sink. This thing went down fast.
00:37:22
28 people are killed when the Britannic sinks. It could have been much worse if the ship had picked up wounded soldiers,
00:37:30
but it was on the way. Thank God. Violet is patched up and she's sent home to England
00:37:36
where she lives with her mom, Kelly. She ends up getting a job at a bank. That sounds way better.
00:37:42
I mean, but she's having problems with her, basically with her cognition because of the head injury.
00:37:49
Years after the sinking, a doctor will be doing a routine exam on her when he tells Violet that she'd actually fractured her skull when her head hit the Britannic's keel.
00:38:01
And she somehow not only survived, but was never treated for it and basically got through it.
00:38:07
Good to know. So a few years after that in 1920, when Violet is around 33 years old, she gets an itch to go back to sea.
00:38:16
Violet will go back to the White Star Line on the restored Olympic, which is the ocean liner she worked on that collided with the hawk.
00:38:25
Number one. Yes. Okay. Violet immediately notices how different the Olympics passengers are from the last time she was on it.
00:38:32
Instead of the stuffy, ultra-rich, bossy assholes that she had worked for before the war.
00:38:37
Victorian Richie Riches. Right. Now she's dealing with Americans. Oh. Many middle class.
00:38:44
Oh. They're just there to have fun. Great. Because on land, it's prohibition. Right.
00:38:49
So that's a new responsibility as a steward and stewardesses on this ship. It's part of your job to basically help these VIPs to booze it up while they're on this ship.
00:39:01
Sounds great. Mm-hmm. And basically, part of the job is you have to hide the booze from customs agents.
00:39:06
Got it. Violet will write about that quote. It was all so fantastic. There were pillars of Wall Street, senators, lawyers, debutantes,
00:39:14
all with their minds on the same problem as we approached the shores of the United States.
00:39:19
How do we keep drinking? So from here, Violet bounces around to other ships. She even completes two cruises around the world on the Red Star Line.
00:39:28
And that experience means a lot to Violet. She's surrounded by diverse people. She's exposed to different world cultures.
00:39:35
and this is when she really begins embracing her life as a stewardess which she then comes to appreciate
00:39:41
for its excitement and its unpredictability and the ways it's tested her spirit and resolve.
00:39:48
Fair enough. I mean, that's quite a line, Maren, having written that of like testing her spirit and resolve.
00:39:54
It's like... You almost died on a three... The ocean wants to kill you so bad, Violet.
00:39:59
Definitely. This is fucking final destination, Victorian. She's like, guess what?
00:40:04
I was at church this morning. It's not happening today. That's right. Mass will keep you from dying.
00:40:10
Violet spends the next several years at sea. She marries and quickly divorces a fellow steward.
00:40:17
In 1950, she retires at the age of 63 and moves into a cottage in Suffolk, England
00:40:22
in a village called Great Ashfield, where she raises chickens, makes an adjacent field available for her neighbor's horses,
00:40:30
who she loves like her own. and she even grows flowers that remind her of the ones that she loved as a little girl in Argentina.
00:40:38
Violet Jessup dies of congestive heart failure in 1971 when she is 83 years old.
00:40:44
What a fucking life. What a life. And despite her long career at sea, she ends her life very grounded, close with her family,
00:40:54
doting on her neighbor's horses, tending to her garden, and every so often delighting in telling one of her unbelievable stories of survival.
00:41:04
And that is the story and the legend of the so-called queen of the sinking ships, Violet Jessup.
00:41:11
Wow. Yeah. I'd take that. I'll take that life. You know. Chick, chick. Chick. Okay.
00:41:17
I'll take it all the way up until hovering over red water while people— Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:41:24
No, I don't want that one. Why me? I don't want that one. that's fucking wild. It is not cool.
00:41:29
Wow. Great job. Thank you. You did it again. Great job. My researcher, Maren McGlashan,
00:41:34
who took that, basically was like, I think I found one that's crazier than all of the Titanic stories combined.
00:41:41
I'm like, how is that possible? That's a good one. Yeah. We believe in you guys.
00:41:46
We believe you. Good job. To everyone listening, don't forget, hashtag my favorite hot dog.
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View important disclosures at acorns.com slash MFM. Goodbye. Okay. Now it's your turn.
00:45:59
Now it's my turn. And we're going to take a turn. Okay, great. Not right away. this is about a not well-known war that took place in western Australia in the 1930s
00:46:15
oh that I mean it's so not well known that we got one email from a listener about it in the gmail
00:46:21
that's it okay but I think it's going to be your new favorite war okay because I know you have so
00:46:26
many I mean yeah it's going to be it's going to be tough I'd say my first favorite wars is mash
00:46:33
okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna start cold and i'll tell you what it's called okay in a moment okay
00:46:41
i'll wait please wait okay please hold so we're in the aftermath of world war one thousands of
00:46:47
veterans who are nicknamed soldier settlers moved to western australia and it's a vast area with a
00:46:54
huge array of climates there's tropical coast up north desert in the interior a mediterranean
00:47:00
climate similar to parts of California on the southwestern coast. It's a fucking beautiful place we should all move to.
00:47:06
We should. Don't you think? Remember, we did like a tour which was kind of southeastern.
00:47:11
Yeah, we didn't go to Perth. We didn't go to Perth. We were mad. Dang. Next time.
00:47:17
So the Australian government has bought thousands of tracts of land to sell to the soldiers at
00:47:21
discounted prices in an effort to reward the men for their service with farmland to develop
00:47:27
and profit from. So they're trying to, you know, expand. Give back, yeah. The wheat grows well, the farmers are insulated a bit from bad years by selling wool from the sheep, and everyone is making money. Everything's fine.
00:48:09
Then, in 1929, your favorite Great Depression happens, the Great Depression. The Great.
00:48:14
The Great. The Greatest Depression. I was falling asleep last night to The World According to Kunk by Philomena Kunk.
00:48:20
Of course. So funny. It's truly one of the best books ever, period. Oh, I thought you were talking about the TV show. You're listening to the book.
00:48:27
Yeah, the audiobook I was listening to. Yeah, okay, got it. At first, when the Great Depression starts, the price of wheat stays pretty stable.
00:48:34
Other prices for goods tank in Australia. So the government pushes a big initiative to get farmers to produce more wheat because it's selling.
00:48:42
Hey, let's just do it. The slogan they come up with for the farmers to grow more wheat is, you want to guess?
00:48:50
It's wheat time, guys. Nope. It's more complicated. It's just grow more wheat. Damn it.
00:48:57
I should have had you on their creative team. God damn it. The Australian prime minister promises the farmers that the government will buy the wheat at a good price.
00:49:05
Australian farmers enthusiastically take him up on this offer, vastly expanding their wheat production.
00:49:11
Right. But by the early 1930s, there's a new prime minister. That always fucking happens.
00:49:16
You never plan for that. Every time it happens. That's Joseph Lyons and the global price of wheat.
00:49:23
Tanks. Tanks for nothing. The government. You acted like you were reading off the page.
00:49:33
Good one. The government, which already is facing a massive deficit, actually goes back on the previous prime minister's promise because they can do that.
00:49:41
So the situation is already fairly bleak at this point by October of 1932. That's where we are.
00:49:49
When that year's wheat harvest is supposed to start. Farmers in the town. I'm going to get these wrong.
00:49:54
Australians, I'm real sorry. Farmers near the towns of Campion and Walgulin, that sounds right,
00:50:02
report an issue. So this area is one of the drier parts of the state, and it wasn't as well suited
00:50:07
to farming already. Right before the farmers are meant to start harvesting their wheat on this
00:50:11
land, a plague overtakes the farms and wreaks havoc on the crops. They trample, they devour,
00:50:19
they're more than a nuisance. They're a downright pestilence of epic proportions.
00:50:25
This is the story of the Great Emu War. Oh, what? Emu. All of a sudden, these poor soldier, gentleman farmers.
00:50:38
It's like it's already not going great. They're just trying to make the best of it.
00:50:41
And suddenly they talk their wife into coming. It's going to be great. We're going to be farmers.
00:50:46
We're going to own land. It's okay. You're afraid of birds. That's fine. And there's hardly any birds out here.
00:50:50
No, it's totally fine. It's Australia. What could go wrong? I mean, wild animal, why is not?
00:50:56
Snakes. Snakes. Crocs. Allocators. And big shout out to my researcher, Allie Elkin, for even coming up with this story because
00:51:04
So good. I saw it and responded in all caps because it was so exciting, you know?
00:51:09
Yes. So let me tell you a little bit about emus since I don't know how familiar you are with them.
00:51:14
I could be thinking of kiwi, which is the small bird. It's not a kiwi. This is the large one that looks kind of like a ostrich.
00:51:22
Yeah. OK. Yeah. OK. So you are actually native to Australia. And I wrote like Charlize Theron.
00:51:29
Wait, that's not right. Is she? No, I think she's South African. Shit. You know who I met?
00:51:34
I met Nicole Kidman. Oh, yes. Barbie. I met Barbie. Margot Robbie. Margot Robbie.
00:51:39
Fuck. Man, I can't even get that right. Don't believe a word I say. You had so many choices.
00:51:44
I did. Just blonde, beautiful actresses. And I picked the wrong fucking one. They're the world's second or third largest bird.
00:51:50
I couldn't tell based on searching. They're right after ostriches. So ostriches are bigger than them.
00:51:56
Then there's emus. Emus are considered one of the closest living relatives to dinosaurs.
00:52:01
Yes. Right? Okay. Particularly to raptors. Oh, man. Yeah. They're the only species of bird that has calf muscles.
00:52:10
Ew, that's so creepy. Isn't that creepy? and little like fighting Irish tattoos on those calf muscles.
00:52:19
Even worse. And they can jump seven feet high. They can sprint for short distances of 40 miles per
00:52:25
hour. That's fast. That's like on the freeway here. And that's actually about the speed of an average
00:52:31
racehorse too. So they're fucking fast little shits. They're fast. Emus have a pouch in their throat that they
00:52:37
use to make deep, booming and grunting sounds for communications. Me too. You know I was going to say that.
00:52:46
This is you too, particularly during breeding season. Hey. And then here is where, note to Georgia,
00:52:53
Ali put a video of an emu running to see how fast it could go. And then I got into a fucking rabbit hole of emu videos.
00:53:01
How'd it go? I wrote zoomies, because emus get zoomies. Emus playing fetch with a little girl, dog and baby.
00:53:09
There's a dog and a baby emu playing. They're fucking adorable. Okay. So is this like people now have emu farms?
00:53:17
Like they're raising them like ostraces? Yes. Okay. So, yeah. So I went down this rabbit hole.
00:53:21
I saw them run. It totally looked like the beginning of Jurassic Park with all these long necks.
00:53:27
Just like they're really fun. And I want one now. And you're, as I was going to say, and you're like, but Vince, come on, just one more.
00:53:32
Come on, we got to save the emus. And actually some emus can be gentle and affectionate if they raised that way from a young age but others can be aggressive and moody especially if they not socialized property Ditto
00:53:46
And they may react angrily to being touched or handled. Hey, what's up? So they have tiny wings, so they're flightless,
00:53:55
but they're known to migrate very long distances in search of food and water. In the past, emus typically moved through this area that we're in toward the coast without staying long before.
00:54:05
But there's been a drought in 1932, and the creation of this new farmland has both cleared areas of vegetation and obstacles and has established new water sources for livestock and irrigation.
00:54:18
It's the perfect place for emus. So in this area, in this time period, guess how many migratory emus visit this area at once?
00:54:31
I'm gonna go ahead and say You don't have to guess if you don't want to I mean look
00:54:38
I don't want to guess but I have to guess No I really want to One emu standing here
00:54:44
How many do you think fucking showed up For the great emu war 500 20,000 20,000 emus
00:54:54
On to this like Smallish Area Because also they're eating that wheat. They're eating the wheat.
00:55:03
Yep. They're drinking all the irrigated water. They're like stomping. They're trampling.
00:55:08
They're like wreaking havoc. Partying. They're fucking partying. This is their kind of, what do you call it, Burning Man?
00:55:15
It's a 1932 early Burning Man. Totally. Emu style. Hey, meet me on the playa. Hey, man, be yourself.
00:55:22
To put that number in perspective, Ali, let me know that 20,000 emus would fill your typical
00:55:27
arena where an NBA team would play. It's the exact capacity of the crypto.com arena.
00:55:34
So imagine playing basketball and then you look up into the crowd and it's fucking just
00:55:37
wall-to-wall emus. And they're like doing weird shit like they're going to come down.
00:55:41
Right. They're like getting ready to. And they're dinosaurs. They're dinosaurs. Same amount of feathers as ostriches?
00:55:48
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. They're similar to ostriches. You would think it was an ostrich.
00:55:53
Yeah. You would. Yeah. You'd get it wrong and you wouldn't be stupid for it. Yeah.
00:55:57
That's what we keep telling ourselves. Right. And to make matters worse, high tariffs imposed in the post-war and Depression era have made wire netting prohibitively expensive.
00:56:09
Oh. So they can't afford to fence out the emus. That's not a choice. Oh, no. I know.
00:56:14
It's literally a perfect story. It is. So the farmers, who are all vets, remember they're all veterans to World War I, say to the level-headed thing,
00:56:22
And they write to the Minister of Defense asking to be supplied with machine guns to kill the emus, as you do.
00:56:30
Well, the problem is, and I think we've talked about this a lot, of like, it's sheer numbers where it's like, if it was 500 emus, they would be a little more reasonable.
00:56:41
20,000 of these birds. 20,000. And then so maybe because the government has jerked these farmers around so many times with the price of weed already, they kind of know they're in trouble with these farmers already.
00:56:53
They want to appear like they're helping them. So the minister says yes to the gun request.
00:56:58
But since the government of Australia has smart brains that think in a normal way, machine guns are tightly regulated there.
00:57:05
Yes. Can you imagine? I mean, what a world to live in. But also, just because the farmer soldiers asked for machine guns, why can't they just have regular guns?
00:57:17
Right. They wanted machine guns. I know. It sounds more fun, probably. They're probably bored out of their fucking minds at this point.
00:57:23
And they're enraged. Enraged. So instead, three specially trained soldiers are sent from Perth to the region to operate the machine guns.
00:57:32
Okay. Everyone doesn't get a machine gun. Great. These three guys get a machine gun.
00:57:36
We'll send machine guns to you. With people who can operate them. Good plan. And it's not just like a little machine gun that you can hold and operate and move around with.
00:57:45
It's a huge tube that needs to be propped up. It has a wheel of bullets. It's like, you know, a World War I type gun.
00:57:51
Yeah. The rest of the farmers are allowed to help shoot at the EMUs, but they have to use boring old regular rifles.
00:57:57
Okay. So the farmers also agree to house the three military specialists and to pay for the ammunition for the guns.
00:58:03
It's not the greatest deal. Plan or deal for them. Yeah, but you do have to do that thing where like after a while you're like, sure, but you did agree to do this huge crazy thing.
00:58:15
Yes, that's true. But under what pretenses? Like were they lies? True. Where it's like, oh, you can farm this beautiful area.
00:58:24
But it's Australia. So it's like it's all snakes and spiders. Yeah. They can't. The expectation couldn't have been.
00:58:31
And no emus. Easy breezy. Yeah, there was no emu clause. No emu clause. We guarantee no large bird will come at you en masse.
00:58:40
Legit dinosaur. Yeah. Hordes of them. Yeah. Okay. So the army specialists are overseen by a man named Major Gwynedd Purvis.
00:58:48
Wynne Aubrey Meredith is his name. Are his six first names? Yeah. Cool. And so he's there overseeing it.
00:58:56
And then a cinematographer also joins the group to film the anti-emu offensive. Okay.
00:59:01
Which is great. Yes. Presumably because people in the Australian government believed it would be successful.
00:59:05
They're like, let's send a cameraman out there and this will be great propaganda for like what we do for our farmers.
00:59:11
The soldiers arrive on November 2nd, 1932, and the war begins. On the first day they arrive a flock of 50 emus is spotted at one of the farms So they set up their guns on some nearby high ground The guns jam almost immediately and the emus scatter
00:59:28
The next day, the soldiers have a bit more success when they set up ambushes around water sources,
00:59:32
but it immediately proves to be very slow going. Between the rifles and the machine guns, the soldiers are able to pick off about, out of 20,000 emus in one day,
00:59:43
they pick off about 12 emus max before the rest of the flock has scurried out of range.
00:59:49
So in a day's work, that's 12 emus out of 20,000. And that's a good day, it turns out.
00:59:54
Oh. The farmers in the military have woefully underestimated their adversaries. I told you about how fast they are. And I told you about how they have calf muscles. So they're
01:00:03
like... So they're cool. Yeah. Kind of hot. The soldiers that were sent to the farms, they start getting nervous. They've been instructed
01:00:10
by one of their commanding officers to bring back at least 100 emu skins because emu feathers are used to decorate
01:00:18
the ceremonial helmets for a particular military unit in Australia. So this commanding officer was like,
01:00:24
hey, this is a great way to get a bunch of fucking emus. But it's becoming increasingly apparent
01:00:28
that killing any emus, let alone 100, to bring back is not going to be easy. Yeah.
01:00:36
Because the emus have now started to appoint their own officers. who act as scouts for the rest of the flock.
01:00:44
Yes. They're fucking smart. They went back to headquarters and they said, sorry, those guys on the hill do not want what's best for us.
01:00:52
No. Something's going down. That's right. One emu work correspondent wrote at the time,
01:00:57
quote, the emus have proved that they are not so stupid as they are usually considered to be
01:01:02
because they do run around like fucking idiots. Like they do run around. They look goofy.
01:01:06
Like turkeys. But it doesn't mean they're dumb. No. He says 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.
01:01:18
At the first suspicious sign, he gives a signal and dozens of heads stretch up out of the crop.
01:01:24
Dinosaurs. A few birds will take fright, starting a headlong stampede into the scrub, the leader always remaining until his followers have reached safety.
01:01:34
Wow. End quote. Shit. So fucking Papa Bear is like, hey, guys, here they are. Also, scatter.
01:01:42
We've survived for hundreds of millions of years, so we got this. Yeah, we're fucking dinosaurs.
01:01:47
No one panic. Remember those cavemen from back then? Remember those fools? From like real recently?
01:01:52
They barely made it. It's those guys. These are cousins of those guys. And they think they're going to kill us.
01:01:57
Yeah. After the first week of the emu war, it is reported that the group have used 2,500 rounds of ammunition
01:02:05
to kill just 300 emus. Oh my God. And that's a generous estimate that comes from one of the military specialists.
01:02:12
And you know, they fucking raise those numbers. Absolutely. So I'm going to read you this quote.
01:02:17
The one person who wrote to our Gmail about, like, you guys should cover this story.
01:02:20
It's really crazy. Is someone named Zagridi, she, her. And Zagridi included a quote
01:02:27
from someone named John P. Rafferty that came from the Wikipedia. So here is that quote that Zagridi included.
01:02:35
Okay. Quote, the machine gunner's dream of point blank fire into serried masses of emus were soon dissipated. The emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic. Meaning like you're wasting your fucking bullets.
01:02:56
Meanwhile in Parliament, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, remember him, is now facing questions about the expense of the Emu War.
01:03:03
One of the members of Parliament from Sydney asked sarcastically if any of the parties involved in the Emu War should be receiving a medal.
01:03:11
Harsh. Yeah. And someone says, if anyone should be getting a medal, it should be the Emus.
01:03:16
That sounds like a fun Parliament. It's true. After two weeks, the Emus seem to have learned the range of the machine guns.
01:03:22
They fucking, you can't hit me this far. You can't get me. I'm out of your range.
01:03:27
It's like when you can't leave the part of the couch that you have won. Right. So then your sister just walks just out of range of like, well, then I'll go get myself like a cookie and you can't have one.
01:03:39
Exactly. They set up shop in the wheat fields just out of that range and move every time the soldiers reposition themselves.
01:03:46
Scatter when the farmers get close with the rifles. All this scattering and running is also causing the emus to trample more wheat than they would have if you had never started this fucking emu war.
01:03:56
After the most successful day of the war, where maybe two dozen emus are killed, RIP,
01:04:01
one of the military specialists examines one of the dead emus and finds that it has five bullets in its body,
01:04:08
some of which are clearly old wounds from the beginning of the campaign. Oh, shit.
01:04:13
Which means that the emus are staying alive and running at close to full speed even after being shot multiple times.
01:04:19
Like they're fucking Terminator. Yes. They're like, oh no, we're going to win this.
01:04:24
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that creepy? It's like sending a message with his body. It's looking more and more like the emus will win the war until suddenly on December 2nd, the war is called off.
01:04:36
I think they're like, let's cut our fucking losses. Yes. This is insanity. The soldiers claim to have killed between 1,000 and 2,000 emus
01:04:43
out of roughly 20,000 that were in the combat zone. And the emus seem to become a part of life for the farmers at this point,
01:04:51
having bested the soldiers. Still, in future years, the soldiers' settlers will continue to request machine guns
01:04:57
to fight off the fucking emus because I bet they reproducing But the Australian Ministry of Defense will turn them down every time Instead the soldier settlers are supplied with additional rifles
01:05:08
and eventually they become more successful at fending off the emus on their own.
01:05:12
Picking them off one at a time. Yeah. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the farmers kill more than 200,000 of them under a bounty system.
01:05:21
Oh. That's a lot. PETA doesn't like that. No, that's bad. I mean, they're so cute.
01:05:27
little babies are they're so cute i mean can't it be like you just get rid of enough so that your
01:05:33
stuff isn't at risk right it always has to be this like now they've killed 200 000 right aren't
01:05:38
now they're endangered yeah exactly okay so then later eventually the price of fencing comes down
01:05:43
and this becomes a much more practical way to deal with emus than fucking killing hundreds and
01:05:49
hundreds and hundreds of them then in 1999 emus become a protected species in australia yay and
01:05:56
there are about 600,000 of them living in Australia today, which is considered a strong population.
01:06:02
So good. They're back, baby. Good, good, good. All riddled with bullets and old wounds.
01:06:07
Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Grandpa is telling the stories about how he survived the Emu War.
01:06:12
They got me with this one. I just kept running. Major Meredith, remember him with the really long name, he goes on to have a storied military
01:06:20
career, having already served in World War I. And he also serves in World War II and in the Korean War with distinction.
01:06:26
But I bet that emu war stuck in his craw. That's the one that got him. Don't you think?
01:06:30
That's the one he fucking couldn't win. Yeah. And that is the story of the Great Emu War.
01:06:37
It's totally insane. I know. Why is he picturing something? It's so good. Here's a farmer with an emu.
01:06:43
Dead emu. Oh. It's pretty sad. He's all mad. He's a big bird, right? Yeah, that is a big old bird.
01:06:49
You know, he's saying, crikey. And he's saying, my calves, please, my calves. Wow.
01:06:58
All right. That was great. Thank you. Thank you, Allie, for finding that in the depths of the Internet.
01:07:03
Nice one, Allie. I really didn't understand what we were doing at the beginning, but it was fun.
01:07:09
What do you think was going to happen? I don't know, but I'm really happy to hear like the idea that like, here's how we're going to use sheer brute force to solve a problem.
01:07:18
And then that problem's like, you're not going to, though. That doesn't work that way.
01:07:22
That's always, I think, a better, you know, it's good. It helps people evolve better ideas.
01:07:29
Yeah. You got to learn how to live in harmony with nature. Yeah. You get your ass kicked if not.
01:07:34
Or how about somebody figures out cheap barbed wire, you fools. You could have saved yourself so much time.
01:07:42
Thank you guys for listening. We appreciate you being here. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
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