Mysterious message in a bottle traced back to original sender
A mysterious message in a bottle has been traced back to its original sender nearly 3000 kilometres away.
The bottle washed up in Rockhampton and the handwritten message inside wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but it has brought two strangers from opposite ends of the country together.
The letter was written two years ago in Tasmania by a primary school student.
“Dear Finder. My name is Ella and I go to Sacred Heart Catholic primary school,” the letter begins.
The caretaker at Shoalwater Bay in Central Queensland stumbled across the bottle yesterday and had to break it to read the message inside.
“We’ve all had a read and all very impressed by the neat handwriting,” the bottle’s finder, Joe Simpson, said.
After some detective work, the original sender was found. It was a girl named Ella Dignay from Sacred Heart school in Tasmania, who is now in Year 8.
“I didn’t really believe it at first, but then my friend called me up and told me that she found an article about it on Facebook,” Ella said.
Ella wrote the letter for a school project and her brother had dropped it off a fishing boat at Bicheno on Tasmania’s east coast in 2016.
In the two years since it was dropped in the ocean, Ella’s message drifted across Bass Strait and up past Sydney and Brisbane.
Eventually, the bottle hit land at Shoalwater Bay near Rockhampton in north Queensland.
It was a journey of about 2,700 kilometres from its starting point in Tasmania.
“It’s just amazing, from the south end of Tasmania all the way up the east coast of Australia,” Mr Simpson said.
“I kinda forgot about it now, but now that I’ve got a reply, I think I’d do it again,” Ella said.
This year, several bottled messages have washed up.
A message in a bottle written 132 years ago was found on an Australian beach by a group of walkers including the parents of Formula One star Daniel Ricciardo, earlier this year.
The rectangular bottle was discovered half-buried in sand dunes near Wedge Island, some 160 km north of Perth, in January.
It has been verified as the world’s oldest known missive of its kind.
