According to Elliot, he and his son Jyah recently stumbled across the bottle while fishing on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.
The message was signed by Paul Gibson, who referred to himself as a 13-year-old English boy who was traveling from the port city of Fremantle in Western Australia to Melbourne, the coastal capital of the southeastern Australian state of Victoria, 50 years ago, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. The note’s author said he was “1000 miles east of Fremantle.”
However, oceanographer David Griffin said it’s impossible for the bottle to have floated in the coastal waters of Australia for 50 years, noting that the “ocean never stays still.” A more plausible explanation, according to Griffin, is that the bottle was buried on a beach before being washed into the sea by a storm.
“If it had been dropped in anywhere in the ocean somewhere south of Australia, then there’s no way it’s going to stay actually at sea moving around for more than a year or two,” Griffin said, according to Time magazine.
In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of British people migrated to Australia.
According to the Museums Victoria, the “large intake of British migrants was encouraged as part of Australia's 'populate or perish' nation-building initiative, which emerged in the aftermath of World War II.”
