WWI soldiers’ message in bottle found on Australian beach after century

An Australian family stumbled upon a remarkable piece of history while cleaning their local beach — a discovery that could have come straight out of a Hollywood movie.

While collecting trash at Wharton Beach, about 600 kilometres southeast of Perth in Western Australia, the Brown family unearthed a century-old glass bottle containing handwritten letters from two Australian soldiers on their way to fight in World War I.

The Schweppes-brand bottle, found earlier this month, was lying just above the waterline when Peter Brown and his daughter Felicity spotted it during one of their regular quad bike trips to clean the shoreline, according to an article by Australia's ABC network.

Inside, sealed and remarkably preserved, were two pencil-written notes from Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37. Both soldiers had penned their letters on August 15, 1916 — just three days after their troop ship, HMAT A70 Ballarat, departed from Adelaide in South Australia for the battlefields of France.

The letters, filled with optimism, provided a rare and intimate window into the lives of two men heading toward one of history’s bloodiest conflicts. Private Neville asked that the bottle’s finder deliver his message to his mother, Robertina Neville, who lived in Wilkawatt, South Australia, now a near-abandoned town. Private Harley, whose mother had already passed away at the time, invited the finder to keep his note. “May the finder be as well as we are at present,” Harley wrote.

Tragically, Neville was killed in action just a year later, while Harley survived the war despite being wounded twice. He later died in Adelaide in 1934 from cancer, which his family believes was caused by being gassed by the German forces in the trenches.

Deb Brown said the family initially doubted that the letters could be legible, as water was visible inside the bottle. However, after leaving it to dry for several days, she managed to extract the letters using surgical scissors.

“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.

Brown suspects that the bottle did not travel far after being thrown overboard more than a century ago. It may have remained buried in the dunes near the shore, only recently uncovered by erosion caused by powerful swells along Wharton Beach.

Upon identifying the soldiers, Brown contacted their descendants, leading to an emotional response from both families. Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, said her family was “absolutely stunned” by the discovery. “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 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Neville’s great-nephew, Herbie Neville, also expressed amazement at the find, describing it 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.

Wharton Beach lies not far from another stretch of Western Australia’s coast where the world’s oldest known message in a bottle was discovered a few years ago. In 2018, a Perth family unearthed a similar bottle containing a note dated June 12, 1886.

Following consultations between Australian museum experts and their German and Dutch counterparts, it was confirmed that the bottle had been thrown overboard from the German ship Paula as part of an ocean current and shipping route experiment conducted by the German Naval Observatory.

By Nazrin Sadigova