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Stevenson Lighthouse Engineers Family Tree [NOT FINISHED]
Links Later-day Saints Family Search
last updated: 18 October 2004
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22. AN UNPROVOKED CONVULSON OF FIRE As if to confirm the passing of a great era, the following year, bushfires levelled the land. The home, sheds and machinery were burnt to ashes. All that survived was the Oak tree planted from a gifted acorn in 1878. It grows there still, a few miles from the Donaldson oak and the Kelvin Grove oak. A previous era of 44 years had passed in 1894, when Robert Louis Stevenson had died of a brain haemorrhage, while penning the final words of an unfinished novel. Those final words written 68 years earlier seemed strangely prophetic after the great bushfire of 1863 had swept away an era. “It had seemed
unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature.” |