Australia–An Australian fisherman searches for the author of a message in a bottle found in South Australian waters 50 years after it was written, a television said Wednesday. Paul Elliot and his son Jyah found the bottle on the west coast of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia when they were fished, he explained to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The man was looking for the author of the message, Paul Gibson, who was described in the note as a 13-year-old English boy traveling on a cruise off the South Australian coast from Fremantle in the west to Melbourne in the east. The bottle could not stay afloat for 50 years on the south coast because “the ocean never stands still,” explained government oceanographer David Griffin, who suspected the jar was buried on a beach for years until being refloated by a storm.
“If left in the water anywhere in the ocean in South Australia, it is impossible for it to stay in the sea moving from one side to another for more than a year or two,” he explained. The author claimed to be “1,000 miles east of Fremantle.” However, it was unclear whether it was 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away from Fremantle, which would have included a southbound on the west coast before heading east. Hundreds of thousands of Britons emigrated to Australia in the 1960s on Australian government-subsidized travel. The children were traveling for free. However, a quarter returned to Britain in a few years, when life in Australia did not meet their expectations.
