Two handwritten messages from Australian soldiers sailing to fight in World War I have been discovered more than a century later on a remote beach in Western Australia. The remarkable find was made on October 9 by the Brown family while cleaning debris along Wharton Beach near Esperance.
Deb Brown said her husband, Peter, and daughter Felicity came across a small Schweppes glass bottle lying just above the waterline. “We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and swe o would never go past a piece of rubbish. So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up,” Brown said.
Inside the bottle were two letters, written in pencil and dated August 15, 1916, by Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37. The soldiers were aboard the troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat, which had departed from Adelaide three days earlier on its way to Europe to reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion.
Both men included lighthearted messages reflecting their optimism at the start of their journey. Harley wrote, “May the finder be as well as we are at present.” Neville told his mother, Robertina, 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.”
He added that the ship was “heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry,” using a classic Australian expression meaning extremely happy. Tragically, Neville was killed in action a year later on the Western Front. Harley survived the war despite being wounded twice, though he later died in 1934 from cancer, his family believes was caused by exposure to gas in the trenches.
Neville had requested that whoever found the bottle deliver his message to his mother in Wilkawatt, South Australia, while Harley—whose mother had already passed—told the finder they could keep his note. More than a century later, the Browns did just that. Because the writing remained legible despite the paper being damp, Brown was able to contact both soldiers’ descendants.
“The bottle is in pristine condition,” she said. “It doesn’t have any growth of any barnacles on it. I believe it must have been buried in the sand for all those years.” Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, said her family was “absolutely stunned” by the discovery.
“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 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Neville’s great nephew, Herbie Neville, described the find as “unbelievable.”
“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,” Neville added proudly.