A Family Epitaph

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last updated: 18 October 2004

17. A FAMILY EPITAPH

When they laid out Joseph in the ground of the Kangaroo Ground cemetery next to Ruth and David the epitaph penned two years later by his distant cousin Robert Louis Stevenson seems singularly appropriate:

‘Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me die.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.’

With the passing of an era, life’s natural harmony causes commencement of a new one and so it was that the children of the pioneering Stevensons, all of them married by 1871, struck off in differing directions.

Joseph in his will left his farm and vineyard at Bank Head to his eldest surviving son, Robert. By codicil Robert was to settle on each of his sisters Margaret and Ellen fifty pounds. To his wife’s namesake Ruth Sadler he entrusted his final life’s work – Kelvin Grove.

By the time of Joseph's death in 1878 all of his children had died or were married and with the exception of Robert and Jane gone from Kangaroo Ground.

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