Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers during their voyage to the battlefields of France in World War I have been discovered more than a century later on the coast of Australia. The remarkable find was made by the Brown family, who stumbled upon a Schweppes-brand bottle just above the waterline at Wharton Beach, located near Esperance in Western Australia, on October 9. Deb Brown shared the story of their discovery on Tuesday, explaining that she, her husband Peter, and daughter Felicity regularly embark on quad bike expeditions to clean up the beach.
"We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and would never pass by a piece of rubbish," said Deb Brown. "So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up."
Inside the clear, thick glass bottle were cheerful letters written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville, aged 27, and William Harley, aged 37, dated August 15, 1916. Their troop ship, the HMAT A70 Ballarat, had departed from Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, on August 12 of that year, embarking on a long journey to reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on the Western Front in Europe.
Tragically, Neville was killed in action a year later, while Harley was wounded twice but survived the war, eventually dying in Adelaide in 1934 from cancer, which his family believes was caused by exposure to gas in the trenches.
In the letters, Neville requested that the finder deliver his note to his mother, Robertina Neville, at Wilkawatt, which is now a virtually ghost town in South Australia. Harley, whose mother had passed away by 1916, encouraged the finder to keep his note. Harley wrote, "May the finder be as well as we are at present," while Neville shared that he was having a "real good time," mentioning that the food was generally good except for one meal they "buried at sea" due to the ship's rough conditions.
The soldiers indicated their location as "Somewhere at Sea" and "Somewhere in the Bight," referring to the Great Australian Bight, an expansive bay stretching from east of Adelaide to Esperance on the western edge of Australia.
Deb Brown suspects that the bottle did not travel far and likely spent over a century buried in the sand dunes. Recent severe erosion of the dunes caused by heavy swells along Wharton Beach may have dislodged it. Remarkably, the paper inside the bottle, although wet, remained legible, allowing Deb Brown to contact the relatives of both soldiers to share the incredible news of the find.
"The bottle is in pristine condition. It doesn't have any barnacles on it," she stated. "If it had been at sea or exposed for that long, the paper would have disintegrated from the sun, and we wouldn't have been able to read it."
Deb Brown expressed her happiness that the bottle was discovered by someone with a connection to the area, stating, "We've filled up ute loads and ute loads over the years out here, so we never go past a piece of rubbish." Over the years, they have found many items, including wine bottles from a decade ago, which might have contained messages.
Harley's granddaughter, Ann Turner, expressed her family's astonishment at the find, saying, "We just can't believe it. It really does feel like a miracle, and we feel like our grandfather has reached out for us from the grave." Meanwhile, Neville's great-nephew, Herbie Neville, noted that this unbelievable discovery has brought their family closer together.
"It sounds as though he was pretty happy to go to the war. It's just so sad what happened. It's so sad that he lost his life," Herbie reflected with pride. "Wow. What a man he was."
