Boy meets author of message in bottle tossed overboard in 1969
Two 13-year-old boys half a century apart have come together across continents thanks to the message in a bottle Paul Gilmore wrote and threw overboard on his passage to Australia as a lad
READING LEVEL: GREEN
The face-to-face meeting between Englishman Paul Gilmore and 13-year-old Jyah Elliott was 55 years in the making.
In 1969, Mr Gilmore – the same age then as Jyah is now – was on a ship from England bound for Melbourne and tossed a message in a bottle overboard.
It was found 50 years later by then nine-year-old Jyah, who was digging in sand dunes at Talia Beach on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula in 2019.
“We went down to Talia to go fishing and Jyah was mucking around in the sand dunes and found a bottle,” Jyah’s dad Paul Elliott said.
“We couldn’t get it out … so Jyah smashed the bottle.”
In the bottle was Mr Gilmore’s Melbourne address and a request for whoever found it to get in contact.
“I just saw a date there, 1969, and thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty old’,” Mr Elliott said.
The Elliott family initially sent a reply to the stated address but got no response.
Four years after landing in Melbourne and having “a wonderful time in Australia” a 17-year-old Mr Gilmore had to return to England to care for his grandparents, who had fallen ill.
When news the bottle had been found made its way back to Mr Gilmore, who is now based in Yorkshire* but was on a cruise ship in Estonia* at the time, it was “quite surreal*”, he said.
“It all comes from the bottle that I dropped in the Indian Ocean somewhere towards the Australian Bight when I was 13-years-old, so that’s quite a while ago,” the 67 year old said.
“I was always hopeful someone would find it, but I had no idea.”
The bottle was actually one of multiple, Mr Gilmore said, so it is possible others may wash ashore in the future.
The bottle find made international headlines when Jyah first found it in 2019 and thanks to the media attention, Mr Gilmore eventually made contact with the Elliott family via email.
“I was shocked and it was a strange situation to be in, just like it is now,” he said.
Carla Elliott, Jyah’s mother, has since been in regular contact with Mr Gilmore, but he could not meet the recipient* of his message in a bottle until now.
“I’ve always wanted to come back to Australia, but I either had the money but no time or the time, but no money,” said Mr Gilmore, a retired teacher. “Now I’ve retired* I’ve got a bit of both.”
Mr Gilmore said visiting Australia was about fulfilling a promise to the Elliott family.
“I always said I would come and visit them and here I am,” he said.
“I had to come and I wanted to see my bottle as well, or what’s left of it, and I want it back.”
Mr Gilmore landed in Darwin two weeks ago before travelling south to meet the Elliott family.
He said seeing the family outside a petrol station in Port Augusta after a long bus ride was “a strange situation to be in”.
“I kind of know them, but not know them,” he said. “It’s the end of a circle in a way … us meeting up.”
They spent a couple of hours “getting to know each other” over a coffee and a meal before travelling back to the Elliott family’s home.
Mr Gilmore will stay with the Elliott family for two days before travelling to Port Lincoln and flying to Adelaide.
On Sunday, the family and Mr Gilmore had a pub lunch in Port Augusta and visited Wadlata Outback Centre “to get to know a bit about the area”.
Mr Elliott said after treating Mr Gilmore to some locally caught seafood, he would take the Englishman to Talia Beach, where the bottle was found.
POLL
GLOSSARY
- Yorkshire: Historic county in northern England with Roman, Viking and medieval heritage
- Estonia: republic in northern Europe bordering the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland
- surreal: strange, not something real, has a dreamlike quality
- recipient: a person who receives something
- retired: no longer working in a paid professional role
EXTRA READING
Message in a bottle found after 50 years
Oldest message in a bottle found in WA
Modern-day message in a bottle
QUICK QUIZ
- What year did Mr Gilmore make his journey from England to Australia?
- Approximately where was he when he threw the bottle that held the message overboard?
- Where, how and in what year did Jyah find the message in the bottle?
- How did Jyah get the message out of the bottle?
- How many years passed between when the message was sent and when it was found?
LISTEN TO THIS STORY
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Message in a bottle
Messages sealed in a bottle and dropped in the ocean date back to ancient times. People may have put a message in a bottle to send a distress call when their vessel was sinking, to say goodbye to a loved one before they went down on a sinking ship, to measure how far it travels and to what oceans, and for lots of other reasons.
If you could write a short piece to place in a bottle and drop in the ocean, what would you want the finder of the bottle to know about you?
Write your message in a bottle.
Place all your messages in a small box, sealed in plastic to be buried safely within the school grounds for people to find in the years to come.
Time: allow 25 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English, History, Personal and Social, Critical and Creative Thinking
2. Extension
What might be the environmental impacts of people dropping bottles into the ocean and then travelling for many years?
Can you think of a more environmentally friendly way to keep the tradition alive?
Time: allow 10 minutes to complete this activity
Curriculum Links: English, Science, Personal and Social, Critical and Creative Thinking
VCOP ACTIVITY
I spy nouns
Nouns are places, names (of people and objects), and time (months or days of the week).
How many nouns can you find in the article?
Can you sort them into places, names and time?
Pick three nouns and add an adjective (describing word) to the nouns.