Tag Archives: ANZAC

109 years on: bottle mail set for delivery

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This interesting piece out of Australia.

Beachcombers along Wharton Beach, southeast of Perth, came across an old bottle. Sealed, it contained two yellowed and deteriorating pencil-written letters.

Carefully retrieved, they were addressed from “somewhere at sea” and detailed an outward-bound leg on the troopship HMAT Ballarat, which departed Adelaide in August 1916, bound for the Great War in Europe.

It turned out they belonged to ANZAC privates Malcolm Alexander Neville (48th Australian Infantry Battalion) and William Kirk Harley (4th Australian Light Horse).

Sadly, Neville would be killed months later in France and remains there with a white cross over his grave. Harley survived and returned home, but passed having never seen his letter again.

The families have been found and are finally set to receive their long-lost sea mail.

The beachcombers are keeping the bottle, though.

Remembering the ANZACs

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While today at dawn is the 107th anniversary of the landings of the combined Australian-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in a bid to knock the Ottoman Turks out of the Great War, it is enshrined as a national day of remembrance in that two Oceanic countries, saluting fallen veterans of each “who served and died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping operations” and “the contribution and suffering of all those who have served.”

In short, a combined Veterans Day and Memorial Day.

The landing at Anzac, Apr 25, 1915, Charles Dixon, New Zealand National Archives AAAC 898 NCWA Q388

With that, strike up the Waltzing Matilda and lift an outsized can of Fosters for any Kiwi or Ozzie you’ve run into in the past.

The more things change…

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Two pictures, about a century apart, but in the same part of the world and with the same context.

An ANZAC soldier trying to spot Turkish snipers during the Gallipoli Campaign, 1915 Turkey, raises his Wolseley pith helmet on his Enfield as his buddy observes for Ottoman muzzle flash.

A USMC Marine uses his entrenching tool to hold his helmet and attract enemy fire while a spotter searches for targets through a small hole in Fallujah, Iraq, 2004

Just waiting for ET to kick up a fight somewhere past Uranus sometime around 2090, then we can put a Space Force sniper team here for a third picture follow-up.