This Schweppes bottle with letters inside was found at Wharton Beach 109 years after it was dropped overboard HMAS Ballarat. Photo: Deb Brown.
After three days at sea, WWI-bound Australian soldiers Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley scribbled letters to their mothers, slid them into a bottle, and dropped it overboard.
More than 109 years later, the letters are set to finally reach home.
Local Paul Brown and his daughter Felicity found the old-school Schweppes bottle at Wharton Beach by while collecting rubbish on the sand earlier this month.
Felicity took the “gift from the ocean” back to her mother Deb, who said she popped the cork out with a skewer and dried the bottle on the windowsill at their Duke Caravan Park house.
“The bottle was in the tide line but we’re starting to think it’s been buried for a long time and in those big swells it’s come out of the sand dunes because there’s not enough damage on the bottle — there’s no growth on it,” Ms Brown said.
She said her family had previously found bottle messages during their beach cleanups, some a few years old, but nothing came close to what she was about to uncover.
“We weren’t terribly excited because we thought ‘no way are we going to be able to read this paper’,” Ms Brown said.
“I put some surgical tweezers in through the neck of the bottle, grabbed hold of the letter which was already in a cigarette shape and then I twisted it gently until it was thin enough to pull up.
“Lo and behold when we opened it, we found the first letter from Malcolm Alexander Neville.”
Records from the Australian National War Memorial showed Private Neville, from Willkawatt, South Australia, was sailing aboard HMAS Ballarat from Adelaide to France in April 1916.
His letter, dated April 15, read:
“Having a real good time, food is real good so far with the exception of one meal buried at sea accompanied by a mouth organ band which played the dead March… We are happy as Larry.”
Ms Brown said his letter was accompanied by a note to the “finder” in which he had written his mother’s name and asked for the letter to be delivered to her.
Pte Neville was killed in action in France exactly one year and one day later at age 28.
He was never married and had no children, and Ms Brown said she thought it would be a “needle in a haystack” to find any living relatives.
But after a deep dive on Facebook and a few phone calls, which she said made her sound like a scammer, she managed to track down Pte Neville’s great nephew, Herbie Neville.
“I’ve had every relation of his in Australia ring me and I’m just at the post office now working out what to buy to send the letter home where it should belong,” she said.
The movie-like plot did not end there — Ms Brown said she recovered a second letter from the bottle, pencilled by a 37-year-old William Kirk Harley.
She said she had left his note to dry in the bottle on the windowsill for a few extra days because it had more water damage.
“I knew it was from another solider because it had the same information but in different writing,” she said.
“I couldn’t read down the bottom because it was wet and torn.”
The Australian War Memorial archives reveal Mr Harley survived the war.
Ms Brown said she tracked down his granddaughter Judy and would be sending the letter her way.
“Those letters have got to go home,” she said.
“It’s a beautiful story and I’m just glad it was found by a local and that now we’ve gone on and found living relatives who are super excited.”
