Messages in a bottle written by two soldiers on 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 WA earlier this month.

Deb Brown, 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.

"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," she said.

Inside were cheerful letters written in pencil by Privates Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, dated August 15, 1916.

Their troop ship HMAT A70 Ballarat had left Ad

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