WWI Soldiers’ Messages In A Bottle Found On Australian Beach More Than 100 years Later

MelbourneThe messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days after their journey to the battlefields of France during the First World War were found on the shores of Australia more than a century later.

The Brown family found the Schweppes brand bottle just above the waterline on Oct. 9 at Wharton Beach near Esperance in Western Australia, Deb Brown said Tuesday.

Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the find during one of the family’s regular ATV trips to clear litter from the beach.

“We do a lot of cleanup on our beaches, so we never pass a single piece of trash. So this little bottle was there waiting to be put away,” Deb Brown said.

Inside the clear, thick glass were cheerful letters dated 15 August 1916, written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville (27) and William Harley (37).

Their troop carrier, HMAT A70 Ballarat, had left Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia, east on 12 August of that year for the long journey to the other side of the world, where its troops would reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on the European Western Front.

Neville was killed in action a year later. Harley was wounded twice but survived the war and died in Adelaide in 1934 of a cancer that his family said was caused by gassing by the Germans in the trenches.

Neville asked the person who found the bottle to deliver his letter to his mother, Robertina Neville, in Wilkawatt, now a virtual ghost town in South Australia. Harley, whose mother had died in 1916, was happy to keep the finder’s note.

Harley wrote: “May the finder be as good as we are now.”

Neville wrote to his mother, “You had a really good time, the food has been really good so far, apart from one meal that we drowned in the sea.”

“The ship was heaving, but we were as happy as Larry,” Neville wrote, using the now-faded Australian colloquial expression for very happy.

Neville wrote that he and his companions were “Somewhere at Sea”. Harley wrote that they were “Somewhere in the Bay”, referring to the Great Australian Bight. This is a huge open bay that starts east of Adelaide and extends to Esperance at its western end.

Deb Brown suspects the bottle didn’t travel very far. It probably spent more than a century on land, buried in sand dunes. Extensive erosion of the dunes caused by massive waves along Wharton Beach in recent months likely displaced it.

The paper was wet but the writing was readable. Thanks to this, Deb Brown was able to notify the relatives of both soldiers about the finding.

The bottle was “in clean condition. There are no barnacles on it. I believe if it had been in the sea or left out in the open for that long, the paper would have disintegrated from the sun. We wouldn’t be able to read it,” he said.

Ann Turner, Harley’s granddaughter, said her family was “absolutely stunned” by the finding.

“We can’t believe it. It truly feels like a miracle and we think our grandfather is reaching out to us from the grave,” Turner told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Neville’s great-nephew Herbie Neville said his family had been brought together by the “incredible” discovery.

Herbie Neville said: “It looks like he was quite happy to go to war. It’s very sad what happened. It’s very sad that he lost his life.”

“Wow. What a man he was,” the great-nephew added proudly.