WW1 Message in a Bottle

The bottle containing both pencilled notes from 2016. 
Discovered on October 9th 2025.

An extraordinary find has just been made on October 9^th.  on Wharton Beach, near Esperance in Western Australia. The Brown family, Deb, Peter and their daughter, Felicity, made the find during one of the family’s regular trips on their quad bikes, to clear the beach of trash. As they were cleaning up the beach, Peter and Felicity spotted the Schweppes-brand old bottle just above the water line, almost waiting to be rescued! Inside the thick glass bottle were two cheerful letters, written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916.

Private Malcolm Neville

 

As extraordinary as the age of the notes is their condition, 106 years later. Though the papers were wet, both letters were still legible when dried out,
so Mrs. Brown began tracking down the soldiers’ families in order to pass them on. She discovered that their troop ship HMAT A70, Ballarat, had left the State capital, Adelaide, on August 12, 1916, on the long journey to the other side of the world where its soldiers would reinforce their battalion, the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion fighting on Europe’s Western Front. Their cheerful notes were scribbled in pencil on that journey. just a few days into their voyage to join the battlefields in France. Private Malcolm Neville, who signed off as "somewhere at sea, August 15th 1916" told his mother that the food on board was “real good with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea!” and that the Ballarat was "Heaving and Balling but we are as happy as Larry. Your loving son”. 

Writing home in WW1.

Mrs Brown located Neville’s great-nephew, Herbie Neville, by searching for the soldier’s name and his hometown, online, as his mother’s address had been included in the original note. Herbie Neville said that the experience of having this letter-from-the-past was “unbelievable.” Apparently, Malcolm had an aunty, now aged 104, who has some war correspondence from Malcolm that was left to her.

 Private Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, said that she and the four other surviving grandchildren were “absolutely stunned” by the message. “It really does feel like a miracle, and we do feel very much like our grandfather has reached out to us from the grave,” she said. “I feel very emotional when I see that the other young man had a mother to write to and that his message in the bottle was to his mother, whereas our grandfather had long ago lost his mother, so he just writes to the finder of the bottle.”  Private Harley’s letter said the bottle had been thrown overboard “somewhere in the Bight”, referring to the Great Australian Bight off the country’s southern coast. 

Wharton Beach, Western Australia

An oceanography professor told ABC [whose story this is] that the bottle may well have been in the water for only a few weeks originally, before it landed at Wharton Beach where it may have lain, buried for over 100 years.

Keeping in touch.

Neville was killed in action a year later at 28. Harley was wounded twice but survived the war, married and had children, dying in Adelaide in 1934 of a cancer his family was sure was caused by his having been gassed by the Germans in the trenches in France.