First World War soldiers’ messages in a bottle found on Australian beach

Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days into their voyage to the battlefields of France during the First World War have been found more than a century later on Australia’s coast.

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

Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the find during a quad bike expedition to clear the beach of rubbish.

“We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and so would never go past a piece of rubbish. So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up,” Ms Brown said.

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

Their troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat had left the South Australia state capital Adelaide on August 12 on the long journey to reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on Europe’s Western Front.

Mr Neville was killed in action a year later. Mr Harley was wounded twice but survived the war, dying in Adelaide in 1934 of a cancer his family say was caused by him being gassed in the trenches.

Mr Neville asked the bottle’s finder to deliver his letter to his mother, Robertina Neville, in Wilkawatt, now a virtual ghost town in South Australia.

Mr Harley, whose mother was dead by 1916, was happy for the finder to keep his note.

He wrote “may the finder be as well as we are at present”.

Mr Neville wrote that he was “having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea”.

The ship was “heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry”, he said.

Mr Neville wrote that he and his comrades were “Somewhere at Sea”. Mr Harley said they were “Somewhere in the Bight”, referring to an enormous open bay that begins east of Adelaide and extends to Esperance on the western edge.

Ms Brown suspects the bottle did not travel far. It is likely to have spent more than a century ashore buried in the sand dunes, and extensive erosion of the dunes caused by huge swells along Wharton Beach in recent months probably dislodged it.

The paper was wet, but the writing remained legible, so Ms Brown was able to notify both soldiers’ relatives of the find.

The bottle “is in pristine condition. It doesn’t have any growth of any barnacles on it. I believe that if it had been at sea or if it had been exposed for that long, the paper would’ve disintegrated from the sun. We wouldn’t have been able to read it”, she said.

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

“We just can’t believe it. It really does feel like a miracle and we do very much feel like our grandfather has reached out for us from the grave,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

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

“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,” he said.

“Wow. What a man he was,” the great nephew added with pride.