Message in a bottle found on Australian beach: What was written on the letters from 1916?

Two messages written by two Australian soldiers to their families as they head off to war have mysteriously appeared over a century after they were written . The short, pencil-written missives stuffed inside a bottle washed ashore on Wharton Beach near Esperance, Western Australia where they were found by a family out enjoying the fresh air on a quad bike expedition.

WWI messages in a bottle found on a beach

The Brown family stumbled across the glass Schweppes bottle with a handwritten note inside on October 9. “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,” Deb Brown explained.

Inside the bottle were two scraps of paper, letters written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville, aged 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916. The two soldiers, from the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion, were aboard troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat, which had set sail from Adelaide on August 12 1916 for France, where they would join up with Allied forces fighting the German army at the front line during World War I.

The letters were addressed to their respective mothers. Neville wrote, “Having a real good time, food is real good so far with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea, accompanied by a mouth organ. We are as happy as Larry”. The other, written by Harley stated: “may the finder be as well as we are at present.”

Neville was killed in action in 1917. Harley meanwhile was wounded twice but survived the war, and returned to his homeland, passing away from cancer in 1934. His family believe that his illness was a result of inhaling mustard gas in the trenches.

Neither soldier probably believed that their letters would actually reach their destination. Neville addressed his to his mother Robertina, Harley, meanwhile, left his note to whoever might find it.

The bottle probably only spent a brief time in the seas before it was washed ashore. Deb Brown suspects it returned to tierra firma relatively quickly and has spent 109 years buried in the sand dunes, only to be uncovered by erosion of the dunes.

“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,” Brown said.

Soldiers’ descendants “stunned”

The letters have been returned to their intended recipients - Harley’s and Neville’s descendants, who were understandably “stunned” 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 is life,” Neville’s great nephew Herbie told local media.

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