GLASS FROM THE PAST...

Messages in bottle written by WWI soldiers are found a century later

- BY ROD McGUIRK

MESSAGE One of the letters and, below, troops during the first World War.

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 discovered the Schweppes-brand bottle just above the waterline at Wharton Beach near Esperance in Western Australia state on October 9, Deb Brown said.

Her husband Peter and daughter Felicity made the find during one of the family's regular quad bike expeditions to clear the beach of rubbish.

"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.