WWI messages in a bottle found on Australian beach more than 100 years later

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Messages in a bottle written by twoAustralian soldiersA few days after their trip to the battlefields in France duringWorld War IIt was found more than a century later on the coast of Australia.

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

Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the discovery during one of the family’s regular quad bike excursions to clear the beach of trash.

“We do a lot of cleanup on our beaches, so we would never pass over a piece of trash. So this little bottle was just lying there waiting to be picked up,” Deb Brown said.

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

Their military ship, HMAT A70 Ballarat, departed the South Australian state capital Adelaide for the east on 12 August that year on a long voyage to the other side of the world where its soldiers would reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Regiment on the Western Front of Europe.

Neville was killed in action a year later. Harley was injured twice howeverHe survived the warHe died in Adelaide in 1934 from cancer, which his family says was caused by himWith gasBy the Germans in the trenches.

Neville asked the bottle’s discoverer to deliver his letter to his mother Robertina Neville in Wilcoat, now a virtual ghost town in South Australia. Harley, whose mother had died by 1916, was happy to have the researcher keep his diary.

“May the discoverer be as we are at present,” Harley wrote.

“He’s having a really good time, and the food so far is very good, except for one meal which we buried in the sea,” Neville wrote to his mother.

The ship was “moving and moving, but we’re as happy as Larry,” Neville wrote, using now-faded Australian slang for “very happy.”

Neville wrote that he and his companions were “somewhere at sea.” Harley wrote that they were “somewhere in the Gulf”, referring to the Great Australian Bight. It is an enormous open bay that begins east of Adelaide and extends to Esperance on its western edge.

Deb Brown suspects the bottle didn’t travel far. It likely spent more than a century on the beach, buried in sand dunes. Widespread erosion of the dunes caused by huge swells along Wharton Beach in recent months may have dislodged them.

The paper was wet, but the writing remained legible. Because of this, Deb Brown was able to notify the soldiers’ relatives of the discovery.

The bottle “is in pristine condition,” she added. There are no barnacles growing on it. I believe that if it had been in the sea or if it had been exposed for a long time, the paper would have disintegrated from the sun. We wouldn’t have been able to read it.”

Harley’s granddaughter, Anne Turner, said her family were “absolutely appalled” by the discovery.

“We can’t believe it. It’s truly a miracle and we feel like our grandfather reached out to us from the grave,” Turner told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Herbie Neville, Neville’s great-nephew, said his family had been brought together by the “amazing” discovery.

Herbie Neville said: “It seems as if he was very happy to go to war. It is very sad what happened. It is very sad that he lost his life.”

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