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.

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 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. 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 the Germans 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. 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.