Overview
- Debra Brown and her family discovered the bottle during a Wharton Beach clean-up in Esperance with handwritten notes inside.
- The messages were dated August 15, 1916, written by Privates Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley aboard HMAT A70 Ballarat, including a note to a finder and a letter to Neville’s mother.
- Brown identified Neville’s great-nephew and Harley’s granddaughter through war records and Facebook and is mailing the letters to their families.
- Service records show Neville was killed in action in France on April 11, 1917, while Harley survived the war and later died at age 55.
- A University of Western Australia oceanographer said currents may have carried the bottle to Wharton Beach within weeks before it was buried and later uncovered by coastal erosion.