WWI Soldiers’ Messages in a Bottle Wash Up on Australian Beach After 109 YearsBy the Associated Press

Two handwritten messages from Australian World War I soldiers, sealed inside a Schweppes bottle, have been discovered more than a century after they were thrown into the sea during their voyage to the battlefields of France.

The remarkable find was made on Wharton Beach near Esperance, Western Australia, on October 9, by the Brown family during one of their routine beach cleanups.

Deb Brown said her husband, Peter, and daughter, Felicity, spotted the bottle just above the waterline. “We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and would never go past a piece of rubbish,” she explained. “So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up.”

Inside were pencil-written letters by Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916 — just three days after their troop ship, HMAT A70 Ballarat, departed Adelaide for Europe.

In the letters, the soldiers described life on board the ship. Neville wrote to his mother, Robertina Neville, saying he was “having a real good time,” adding with humour that “the food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea.”

Harley added a lighter note: “May the finder be as well as we are at present.”

Neville was killed in action a year later in France, while Harley, though wounded twice, survived the war but died in 1934 from cancer his family believes was caused by German gas attacks in the trenches.

The letters were written “somewhere at sea,” as the men crossed the Great Australian Bight on their way to join the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on the Western Front.

Experts believe the bottle likely didn’t drift far but remained buried in sand dunes for over a century before being unearthed by recent coastal erosion.

The discovery has been hailed as a poignant reminder of the human stories behind WWI — two young men sharing hope, humour, and courage before stepping into history.