"May whoever finds this be as happy as we are right now," writes the then 37-year-old Harley in his letter.
He and 27-year-old Neville had left Adelaide, South Australia, on August 12, 1916, to join the war front in France. A few days later, they had written down their thoughts in pencil and thrown the bottle with the pieces of paper overboard in the middle of the Great Australian Bight.
It probably didn't make it that far, but appears to have bobbed ashore and hidden in the sand along Australia's southern coast. That's what the Brown family, who have now found the bottle on paradisiacal Wharton Beach, guess.
"We clean up our beaches often, we wouldn't just walk past a piece of trash. And then there was this little bottle," says Deb Brown.
Neville was killed in battle the year after the letter was written. Harley survived the war, but died relatively young in 1934 – probably from cancer caused by Germany's gas warfare, according to his family.
The survivors of both soldiers are very moved by the more than century-old find.
It sounds like he was quite happy going to war, says Herbie Neville, a young relative of Malcolm Neville.
It's so sad how it turned out. That he lost his life.
But the ancestor's fate still impresses.
Wow. What a man he was, says Herbie Neville.
