More than a century ago, two bored World War I Australian army recruits passed the time during their unit’s voyage to war-torn France by scrawling cheerful messages in pencil on scraps of paper.
They sealed up both notes in a single glass soda bottle and tossed it overboard, sailing away to their respective destinies — one to a graveyard, the other to a field hospital and ultimately back home.
Last month, as a family patrolled Wharton Beach in Western Australia on a mission to clean up trash, they made a shocking discovery: an antique Schweppe’s bottle containing the century-old letters.
“We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and so would never go past a piece of rubbish,” Deb Brown told CBS News. “So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up.”
Brown told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that she initially expected the notes would be unreadable because there was water in the bottle and the paper was wet.
“However, after leaving the bottle to dry for a few days, she was able to recover the [letters] with a pair of surgical scissors,” the network reported.
The letters were dated Aug. 15, 1916.
Private Malcolm Neville, 27, had addressed his note to his mother, telling her they were “having a real good time” on the voyage, NBC news reported.
He described the food, which was “real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea, accompanied by a mouth organ band which [played] the dead march from [Handel’s oratorio] ‘Saul.’”
Neville described the movement of the troop ship Ballarat as “heaving and rolling, but we are happy as Larry.” (“Happy as Larry,” CBS News explained, is “a now-faded Australian colloquialism meaning very happy.”)
He signed the letter, “Your loving Son, Malcolm.”
In his note, Private William Harley, who was 37 at the time, described the ship’s location as “somewhere in the Bight,” referring to the large open bay off the southern coast of Australia.
Since his mother was no longer living, Harley addressed his note simply to the finder of the bottle and expressed his wish that the stranger would be “as well as we are at present.”
Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days into their voyage to the battlefields of France during World War I have been found more than a century later on Australia’s coast…
The Brown family found the Schweppes-brand bottle just above the waterline at… pic.twitter.com/rKdccxLCq3
— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) October 30, 2025
Brown and her family were thrilled to read the brief bits of correspondence, and they tracked down and contacted survivors of both men.
“We thought, ‘Oh wow, this is wonderful,’ so we jumped on the computer and onto the Australian War Memorial,” she said.
Harley’s granddaughter told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that her relatives were “absolutely stunned” at the news.
“We just can’t believe it. It really does feel like a miracle and we do very much feel like our grandfather has reached out for us from the grave,” she said.
Sadly, the Browns learned that Neville had been killed in action in France just eight months later, in April 1917.
His great nephew Herbie Neville marveled at the glimpse into his ancestor’s life.
“It sounds as though he was pretty happy to go to the war. It’s just so sad what happened. It’s so sad that he lost his life,” Herbie Neville said, adding, “Wow. What a man he was.”
Harley survived the war despite being wounded twice. He died in 1934 “of a cancer his family [says] was caused by him being gassed by the Germans in the trenches,” according to NBC News.
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