Bottle messages written by World War I soldiers in 1916 found on an Australian beach:

More than a century later, messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days after their trip to the battlefields of France during the First World War have been found on the coast of Australia.

The Brown family found the Schweppes brand bottle just above the waterline at Wharton Beach, near Esperance, Western Australia state, on Oct. 9, Deb Brown said Tuesday.

Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the discovery during one of the family’s regular quad expeditions to clear the beach of rubbish.

“We do a lot of cleaning on our beaches and so we never miss a piece of trash. So this little bottle was there waiting to be picked up,” Deb Brown said.

Inside the thick clear glass were cheerful letters written in pencil by soldiers Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916.

His troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat had left Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia, heading east on August 12 of that year, on a long voyage to the other side of the world, where his soldiers would reinforce the Australian 48th Infantry Battalion on Europe’s Western Front.

Neville was killed in action a year later. Harley was wounded twice but survived the war and died in Adelaide in 1934 from cancer which his family said was caused when the Germans gassed him in the trenches.

Neville asked the bottle finder to deliver his letter to his mother, Robertina Neville, in Wilkawatt, now a virtual ghost town in South Australia. Harley, whose mother had died in 1916, was glad that the finder kept his note.

Harley wrote “may the seeker be as well as we are now.”

Neville wrote to his mother that “I was having a great time, the food is very good so far, with the exception of one meal we buried in the sea.”

The ship “was heaving and rocking, but we are as happy as Larry,” Neville wrote, using a now-faded Australian colloquialism meaning “very happy.”

Neville wrote that he and his comrades were “somewhere in the sea.” Harley wrote that they were “somewhere in the inlet”, referring to the Great Australian Bight. It is a huge open bay that starts east of Adelaide and extends to Esperance at the western end.

Soldier’s granddaughter ‘absolutely stunned’

Deb Brown suspects the bottle didn’t get very far. It probably spent more than a century on land buried in the sand dunes. Extensive dune erosion caused by huge waves along Wharton Beach in recent months likely displaced it.

The paper was wet, but the writing was still legible. Thanks to that, Deb Brown was able to notify the families of both soldiers about the discovery.

The bottle “is in perfect condition. It doesn’t have any barnacle growth on it. I think if it had been in the sea or if it had been exposed for that long, the paper would have disintegrated from the sun. We wouldn’t have been able to read it,” he said.

Brown told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. he was happy someone with a connection to the area found the bottle.

“We’ve filled up tons of utes and more utes over the years here, so we never overlook a piece of rubbish,” he told the ABC. “We’ve collected bottles of wine from 10 years ago that might have a message or something random on them.”

Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, said her family was “absolutely stunned” by the discovery.

“We just can’t believe it. It really feels like a miracle and we feel very much like our grandfather helped us from the grave,” Turner told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Neville’s great-nephew Herbie Neville said his family had bonded over the “incredible” discovery.

“It seems like he was very happy to go to war. It’s very sad what happened. It’s very sad that he lost his life,” Herbie Neville said.

“Wow. What a man he was,” the great-nephew added proudly.

The discovery comes about a year after a message in a bottle. written 200 years ago by an archaeologist it was found on top of a French cliff.