Robert Louis Stevenson: His Association with Australia

In the year 1890, Stevenson was living at Apia in Samoa where he had purchased some three hundred acres in the bush, two miles behind and six hundred feet above the level of the town, and on which he proposed to build a cottage for himself and his family. Why did he almost immediately leave Samoa to pay his first visit to Sydney? The answer, as he tells us himself, was not "for the purpose of spying out the land," but first because he was seeking health, and secondly because he wished to co...