By_Suraj Karowa/ANW , November 1, 2025
Melbourne, Australia (AP)
— In a remarkable discovery blending history and serendipity, a family cleaning trash from a remote Australian beach unearthed a Schweppes glass bottle containing handwritten letters from two World War I soldiers, penned more than 109 years ago. The find, made on October 9, 2025, at Wharton Beach near Esperance in Western Australia, has reunited descendants with poignant messages from the front lines of a long-forgotten voyage.
The Brown family—Deb, her husband Peter, and daughter Felicity—stumbled upon the clear, thick-walled bottle just above the waterline during a routine quad bike patrol to clear debris. “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 told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Inside were two pencil-written notes, remarkably legible despite being damp, from Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37. Dated August 15, 1916, the letters were composed aboard the troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat, just three days after it departed Adelaide in South Australia.
The vessel was ferrying reinforcements for the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion to the brutal trenches of Europe’s Western Front.
Neville, addressing his mother Robertina at Wilkawatt—a now near-ghost town in South Australia—requested the finder deliver his note.
He described the journey cheerily: “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 added, invoking an old Australian idiom for extreme contentment. He signed off from “Somewhere at Sea.”
Harley, whose mother had passed by 1916, allowed the finder to keep his message. “May the finder be as well as we are at present,” he wrote from “Somewhere in the Bight,” referencing the vast Great Australian Bight bay stretching from east of Adelaide to Esperance.
The soldiers’ fates diverged tragically. Neville was killed in action in 1917, a year after casting the bottle. Harley survived two wounds and German gas attacks in the trenches but succumbed to cancer—attributed by his family to the gassing—in Adelaide in 1934.
Deb Brown believes the bottle never ventured far offshore. “It likely spent more than a century ashore buried in the sand dunes,” she said. Recent massive swells eroded the dunes, dislodging it. The bottle’s pristine condition—no barnacles or sun damage—supports this, as prolonged exposure would have destroyed the paper.
Thanks to the intact writing, Brown traced and notified relatives. Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, called the discovery “absolutely stunned” and miraculous. “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 Corp.
Neville’s great-nephew, Herbie Neville, described the find as “unbelievable,” noting it had brought the family together. “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,” Herbie added with pride.
The Ballarat carried thousands of Australian troops across oceans during WWI, evading enemy submarines on routes vital to the Allied effort. Such message-in-a-bottle practices were common among soldiers, offering a whimsical connection to home amid uncertainty.
Experts say ocean currents in the Great Australian Bight could theoretically carry objects vast distances, but erosion evidence points to local burial. The bottle is now preserved, with plans for museum display to honor the Anzacs’ legacy.
This serendipitous unearthing echoes rare WWI artifacts surfacing worldwide, reminding modern Australia of the Great War’s human cost—over 60,000 Australian deaths. For the Browns, a trash pickup turned into a historical treasure, bridging generations across a century of silence.