Messages in a Bottle from WWI Soldiers Found on Australian Beach After More Than a Century

Two handwritten letters penned by Australian soldiers on their way to the battlefields of France during World War I have surfaced on a remote stretch of beach in Western 🇦🇺Australia — more than a century after they were written.

According to The Associated Press, the Brown family made the extraordinary discovery on Oct. 9 while cleaning up Wharton Beach near Esperance, Western 🇦🇺Australia.

“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 said Tuesday.

Inside the clear Schweppes-brand bottle were pencil-written letters dated Aug. 15, 1916, from Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37. The pair had just embarked on the troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat, which departed Adelaide three days earlier to reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on Europe’s Western Front.

Neville was killed in action a year later, while Harley — wounded twice and later gassed in the trenches — survived the war but died in 1934 from related cancer, according to his family.

Neville’s note asked that the finder deliver it to his mother, Robertina Neville, in the now-abandoned town of Wilkawatt, South Australia