Letters in a bottle delivered 100 years on to descendants of World War I soldiers

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Two messages penned by Australian World War I soldiers have made their way back to relatives more than a century after they were thrown overboard in a glass bottle. The bottle was found on a remote beach on Western Australia's south coast, sparking a nation-wide search for the letter writer's descendants.

Transcript

00:00It's the letter that's taken more than a hundred years to arrive.

00:06A message from Private William Harley, written in 1916 on his journey to the Western Front,

00:12now reunited with his grandchildren in Adelaide.

00:16May the finder be as well as we are at present.

00:20William was the one person of all of our ancestors that I really, really, really always wanted to meet.

00:28A bottle thrown overboard the HMAT Ballarat, with two letters from William Harley and fellow soldier Malcolm Neville

00:36as they shipped to the battlefields of France, was discovered on WA's south coast last month.

00:42Now the letters have travelled across the country to family in Alice Springs and Adelaide.

00:48Malcolm Neville was killed in action months after writing his letter, but William made it back home to South Australia.

00:55Hundreds of Australian soldiers left Adelaide on the troop ship Ballarat in August 1916.

01:01By that point, the war was well underway.

01:04We know at the outbreak of war there was that enthusiasm to, you know, people to enlist to do their bit,

01:11and the war was like a great adventure.

01:14And it started to wear off by 1916 because the casualty lists from Glygley were well known.

01:20Australian War Memorial curator Bryce Abraham says many soldiers turned to diary and letter writing

01:26to pass their time on their weeks-long voyage to Europe.

01:30However, only three messages in a bottle exist in the museum's collection.

01:34And it seems to be almost a thing of the times as well, that as part of that great adventure,

01:39it was like a fun thing to do, toss a bottle over the side.

01:42Now returned home, the family will be exploring ways to preserve their piece of war history.

01:47There's some very, very talented people here who can give us the right advice on exactly how to preserve it.

01:55And then we need to find the right home for it for posterity.

01:58A century-old letter capturing the sentiment of a soldier heading to war.

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