A painter in Tasmania has discovered a sealed glass bottle containing a 120-year-old message hidden inside the walls of the historic Cape Bruny Lighthouse.
Brian Burford, a specialist painter, made the find while performing maintenance on the seaside structure. According to Annita Waghorn from the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, Burford was working in the lantern room—the top section of the lighthouse housing the lens and lighting mechanism—when he noticed something glinting in the wall cavity.
“He was so excited he called me right away and said he’d found a message in a bottle,” Waghorn recalled.
The bottle wasn’t just holding a simple note—it contained an envelope with two handwritten pages detailing upgrades made to the lighthouse in 1903. These improvements, including a new staircase, floor, lantern room, and lens, were added nearly 70 years after the lighthouse was first built in 1838.
The note was signed by JR Meech, a lighthouse inspector for the Hobart Marine Board, who oversaw construction and maintenance at several famous Tasmanian lighthouses, including Cape Sorell, Maatsuyker Island, and Tasman Island.
“It was incredibly exciting,” Waghorn said. “At first, it was a complete mystery—what the message said and how it ended up in such a hard-to-reach spot inside the tower.”
Removing the message wasn’t easy. Waghorn sought help from conservators at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery to carefully extract the fragile paper.
“The bottle was sealed with a cork coated in bitumen, which made it tricky to open,” explained Cobus van Breda, the museum’s senior paper conservator. “We had to carefully remove the bitumen from the cork and then work it loose from the glass. Even then, the folded message was difficult to pull out without damaging it.”
It took several days to fully decipher Meech’s writing. The museum now plans to display the letter for the public to see.
