Clue found to Australia's earliest message in a bottle (2025)

Every week for more than 30 years, a small team of historians on the New South Wales south coast has trawled through old newspapers to come up with material for a column about life 100 years ago.

Sometimes the headlines are mundane: upgrades to a butchery to keep flies off the meat or the price of wool increasing.

But every so often there is a nugget of historical gold.

So it was when the team flipped through the Moruya Examiner from January 3, 1925, and saw an article without a headline wedged into the top of page three.

It was a story about a message in a bottle that washed up on Bingie Beach, south of Batemans Bay.

Researcher Julian Armstrong decided the newspaper clipping was a breadcrumb along a trail worth investigating.

"I just thought it might be interesting to do a little bit more research," he said.

What he didn't realise at the time was that he may have stumbled onto evidence of Australia's earliest recorded message in a bottle.

Hunting historical clues

The article included a transcript of the original letter and names of nine Scottish seamen aboard the Loch Rannoch, along with the islands they came from.

The sailors had drunk out of a bottle bought in Glasgow, before throwing it overboard.

In the note inside, they wrote of their intention of "clearing out to try our luck" when they arrived in Port Phillip Heads the following day.

The Loch Rannoch arrived in Port Phillip Bay on July 24, 1877.

The bottle was found 48 years later, more than 400 nautical miles north of where it was apparently tossed into the sea.

If the information included in the clipping is correct, the message in a bottle would be the earliest written to be discovered on Australian shores and the fourth-oldest in the world.

The article contains no information about what happened to the bottle, or who found it.

"No other newspapers seemed to pick it up," Mr Armstrong said.

"I suppose in 1925 a bottle that was 50 years old might not be so exciting.

"But if you found a bottle that was 150 years old it might be a bit more exciting, and you might've kept the bottle."

Mr Armstrong was able to find very little information about the sailors themselves.

"We don't really know what happened to the nine sailors," he said.

"They all had Scottish surnames. If you go back and have a look at the [Scottish] records, unfortunately every second person on those islands has that surname.

"If they did desert the ship, they probably changed their names. So they'd be hard to track down."

Mr Armstrong hopes further deep dives into old newspapers will see more information come to light.

"We are hoping that maybe in February or March of 1925, which we haven't got to yet, someone might have written in with more information," he said.

Connecting with history

Australian National Maritime Museum head of knowledge Peter Hobbins said only a couple of bottles with messages inside washed up every decade or so, so every discovery was exciting.

Dr Hobbins said the newspaper clipping discovered in Moruya was "amazing".

He said the more mundane the message, the more likely it was real, and that the bottle found at Bingie was likely one of the earliest written.

"Up until the 1850s a lot of people on board ships may not have been literate," he said.

"You've got this period from 1850 to 1950s, when aeroplanes became popular, where there were literate people who had pencil and paper on a ship and could write a note and then would want to throw it overboard."

He said the peak era for messages in bottles in Australia was during World War I, when departing soldiers threw messages to loved ones overboard en route to the front.

Dr Hobbins said the messages included in bottles established a relationship with figures from the past.

"Everyone loves a message in a bottle," he said.

"Someone from the past is speaking directly to us today. We find the bottle and it connects us with that person.

"Most of us hope there's going to be a treasure map with a big X on it in the bottle as well.

"It's a lovely maritime tradition and it's the sort of thing people could still do today."