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 Wharton Beach near Esperance in Western Australia state on Oct. 9, Deb Brown said on Tuesday.
Her husband, Peter, and daughter Felicity made the find during one of the family’s regular quad bike expeditions to clear the beach of trash.
Photo: AP
“We do a lot of cleaning up on our beaches and so would never go past a piece of rubbish. So this little bottle was lying there waiting to be picked up,” Deb Brown said.
Inside the clear, thick glass were cheerful letters written in pencil by privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated Aug. 15, 1916.
Their troop ship, the HMAT A70 Ballarat, had left the South Australia state capital, Adelaide, to the east on Aug. 12 of that year on the long journey to the other side of the world, where its soldiers would reinforce the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion on Europe’s western front.
Photo: AP
Neville was killed in action a year later. Harley was wounded twice, but survived the war, dying in Adelaide in 1934 of a cancer his family say was caused by him being gassed by Germans soldiers in the trenches.
Neville requested the bottle’s finder deliver his letter to his mother, Robertina Neville, at Wilkawatt, now a virtual ghost town in South Australia. Harley, whose mother was dead by 1916, was happy for the finder to keep his note.
Harley wrote: “May the finder be as well as we are at present.”
Photo: AP
Neville wrote to his mother he was “having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea.”
The ship was “heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry,” Neville wrote, using an Australian colloquialism meaning very happy.
Neville wrote that he and his comrades were, “somewhere at sea.” Harley wrote that they were “somewhere in the bight,” referring to the Great Australian Bight, an enormous open bay that begins east of Adelaide and extends to Esperance on the western edge.
Deb Brown suspects the bottle did not travel far. It likely spent more than a century ashore buried in the sand dunes. Extensive erosion of the dunes caused by huge swells along Wharton Beach in recent months probably dislodged it.
The paper was wet, but the writing remained legible. Because of that, Deb Brown was able to notify both soldiers’ relatives of the find.
The bottle “is in pristine condition. It doesn’t have any growth of any barnacles on it. I believe that if it had been at sea or if it had been exposed for that long, the paper would’ve disintegrated from the sun. We wouldn’t have been able to read it,” she said.
Harley’s granddaughter Ann Turner said her family was “absolutely stunned” by the find.
“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,” Turner told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Neville’s great nephew Herbie Neville said his family had been brought together by the “unbelievable” discovery.
“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 is life,” Herbie Neville said.
“Wow. What a man he was,” the great nephew added with pride.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS