Messages in a bottle from World War I soldiers found on the Australian coast

Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers in 1916 have been discovered more than a century later on the country’s southwest coast.

The cheerful notes were written just days after their journey to join the battlefields of France during the First World War.

One of the soldiers, Pte Malcolm Neville, told his mother that the food on board was “really good” and that they were “as happy as Larry”. Months later, he was killed in action at the age of 28. The other soldier, Pte William Harley, 37, survived the war and returned home.

The letters were handed down to their descendants, who were astonished by the discovery.

The bottle was found earlier this month on remote Wharton Beach, near Esperance in Western Australia, by local resident Deb Brown and her family.

She was visiting the beach with her husband and daughter on one of their regular four-wheeler trips to clean up litter when they spotted a thick glass bottle in the sand, she said Tuesday.

“We do a lot of cleaning on our beaches and so we would never walk past a piece of trash. So this little bottle was just sitting there waiting to be picked up,” Ms. Brown told the Associated Press.

Although the paper was wet, both letters were still legible, so Mrs. Brown began tracking down the soldiers’ families to deliver them.

Ms Brown found Pte Neville’s great-nephew, Herbie Neville, by searching online for the soldier’s name and the town he was from, as his mother’s address was included in the note.

Mr Neville told ABC News the experience had been “unbelievable” for his family, especially Marian Davies – Pte Neville’s niece – who remembers her uncle leaving to go to war and never coming back.

The second letter, written by Pte William Harley, was addressed simply to whoever found the bottle. His mother died years ago.

Pte Harley’s granddaughter, Ann Turner, told the ABC she and the soldier’s four other surviving grandchildren were “absolutely stunned” by the news.

“It really feels like a miracle and we really feel like our grandfather has reached out to us from the grave,” she said.

“I feel very emotional when I saw that the other young man had a mother to write to, and this message in the bottle was to his mother, while our grandfather had long since lost his mother, so he just wrote it to whoever found the bottle.”

The bottle was thrown overboard “somewhere in the bay”, Pte Harley’s letter said, referring to the Great Australian Bight off the country’s southern coast.

An oceanography professor told the ABC it could have been in the water for just a few weeks before landing on Wharton Beach, where it could have remained buried for 100 years.