TA Wilkes’ 83-year-old message from bottle found on Ceduna beach revealed
It's taken painstaking efforts to reveal the words sealed in a bottle and tossed into the sea eight decades before it was found washed up in the sand.
SA News
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Who knows why T.A. Wilkes put a letter in a beer bottle and tossed it over the gunwale of the Manoora on October 28, 1938.
Boredom would be a fair guess. It was a long haul from Sydney to Fremantle via the Great Australian Bight, and Mr Wilkes may have been looking for a way to kill some time.
We know that he took an envelope bearing the ship’s letterhead and used a lead pencil to write the following note in his elegant cursive:
“Would any person finding this bottle please post this note to T.A. Wilkes, Rottnest Island, West Australia who will reward them. Thank you.”
Then, as if an afterthought, Mr Wilkes has written “State where found.”
Where the note was found, however, is not the interesting part of this tale. The bottle and note were discovered on a surf beach near Ceduna, probably not that far from where it was tossed from the ship.
It’s the when that makes this story fascinating, with Mr Wilkes’s message finally being seen by another human almost 83 years after he wrote it.
It makes the find one of the oldest messages in a bottle in Australia, and indeed the world, with experts saying the chances of finding a legible note more than eight decades after it was written as being like finding a needle in a haystack.
Or, you know, a longneck in the Great Australian Bight.
Like most photographers Andrew Brooks loves a good storm.
So when a savage frontal system slammed into the state’s West Coast this winter, Mr Brooks grabbed his camera and headed to one of his favourite beaches at Point Brown to see what the weather had tossed up.
A big swell and a high tide meant Mr Brooks was forced to walk near the edge of the dune system, and it was here that the neck of a brown bottle protruding from the sand caught his eye.
Picking it up he was instantly swarmed by a colony of ants that had made the bottle their home. After shaking out the ants, along with a lot of sand, Mr Brooks peered down the neck of the bottle and was shocked by what he saw – a rolled up envelope with type on the outside.
He couldn’t read the letters, but he could read the date on the bottom of the bottle – 1935.
Mr Brooks drove the bottle home to examine it under better light, and could make out a few letters on the envelope. TSMV and an ORA at the end. A quick Google search threw up TSMV Manoora, an Adelaide Steamship Company vessel that plied the passenger route between Cairns and Fremantle in the 1930s before being commandeered for war service in the forties.
“It was the highest tide of the year with a full moon and massive storm front,” Mr Brooks said.
“So I went down to take some photos and do some filming. This extra large wave came roaring up the beach, so I had to leg it into the vegetation so I didn’t get wet. That’s where I noticed the bottle.”
Mr Brooks said only the neck and part of the shoulder was protruding from the sand, but he could instantly see that it was old.
“That night I wiped it down with a damp cloth, held it up to light and realised that what I thought was marine detritus was actually paper,” he said.
“I thought, ‘Oh that’s interesting’. Next morning I took it outside to the bright sunshine and spotted the letters TSMV (twin screw motor vessel).”
Mr Brooks took his find to the South Australian Maritime Museum, where senior curator Lindl Lawton described it as ‘desperately romantic”.
“I love it,” Ms Lawton said.
“The Manoora was an Adelaide Steamship Company ship, and the Adelaide Steamship Company was a massive business. The ship was built in Scotland in 1934 and launched in 1935, and ran the Cairns to Fremantle route.”
After it was requisitioned by the Royal Australian Navy in 1939 for service in the Second World War, the Manoora was fitted with seven 6-inch guns, two anti-aircraft guns and two mounted machine guns and sent to the Coral Sea.
During its war service it survived attacks from Japanese Kamikaze pilots and sank an Italian ship before serving in the Philippines, Luzon, Borneo, and during the occupation of Rabaul where its crew reportedly witnessed the formal surrender of the Japanese.
After the war it resumed service as a passenger ship before competition from airlines saw it retired and sold to the Indonesian government in 1961 where it was put to work transporting Muslim pilgrims from Indonesia to Mecca. It was sold to ship breakers in 1972 and sank off the Philippines on its way to being scrapped.
“This bottle really is quite old,” Ms Lawton said.
“The oldest bottle was found of the West Australian coast in 2018, and that was released in 1886 from a German vessel called The Paula as part of an experiment to track ocean currents.”
Ms Lawton said it was likely the bottle had been buried on the beach from not long after being thrown into the sea.
“My hope is that we can find a name, and a surname, and that we can connect with that person’s family. The stories always take flight, because people love the sleuthing involved.”
After assessment at the Maritime Museum the bottle was examined by preservation experts at Artlab Australia, who determined that it would be too risky to attempt to remove the letter via the bottle’s neck and that the bottom would have to be cut off.
That delicate task fell up the JamFactory’s head of glass studio Kristel Britcher.
“We used a hot torch to cut the glass,” Ms Britcher said.
“Scoring it with a glass cutter leaves a scratch in it and adding the heat encourages it to break in a particular spot. It worked exactly as I hoped. This was the best-case scenario – worst case was that it exploded.”
From there the bottle was taken back Artlab’s offices where senior paper conservator Aquila Evill and principal conservator of books and paper Roberto Padoan set to work carefully extracting the envelope from the glass, then removing the letter from the envelope.
In a scene that resembled an operating theatre, the pair worked together using specialised tools, slowly and carefully separating each piece of paper until, finally, the letter was revealed.
Ms Evill said that when she first saw photographs of the bottle she didn’t have high hopes. “I thought there would be nothing to work with,” Ms Evill said.
“It looked stuck to the bottle and quite fragmented. I was pleasantly surprised.
“Once the base of the bottle came off we could see that the envelope had actually afforded the letter quite a lot of protection. But, like with all paper, there was always the possibility that it had been affected by moisture and become bonded together or gone mouldy.”
Ms Evill said the mass produced paper of the 1930s was another possible impediment, and that in many instances it was more fragile than paper that was much older.
“With no cap on that bottle it was open to the elements so I think we were very lucky to get this result,” she said.
“And we were also lucky that the medium was graphite pencil, which is very stable (compared to ink).”
Ms Evill said it was the first time she had worked on a message in a bottle.
“I love a challenge, and that certainly was a challenge,” she said.
“You never know what’s hidden and that’s why we had to go very slowly and very cautiously. You don’t want to lose anything.”
So who was T.A.Wilkes, the man who sparked this mystery and forensic operation?
It turns out Mr Wilkes was a West Australian shopkeeper who ran a general store at Mount Barker, near the town of Albany.
According to newspaper clippings from the day, Mr Wilkes suffered a serious knee injury in a car crash in 1936, before joining his sons on Rottnest Island to run a shop at Thomson Bay in 1937.
Passenger records from 1938 reveal that Mr Wilkes was indeed a passenger on the Manoora in 1938, but it is not known why he made the long sea voyage.
Mr Brooks said he planned to let the Maritime Museum display the letter and bottle at its Port Adelaide facility.
If you have any information on Mr Wilkes we’d love to know. Please put any information you may have into a sealed bottle addressed to the Sunday Mail and throw it into your nearest sea (or email nathan.davies@news.com.au)
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