Edward
George Dyson was born on 4 March 1865 at Morrison, near the Ballarat
goldfields, the son of a miner, George Arthur Dyson, and his wife Jane (ne
Mayall). The increasingly large Dyson family followed George Dysons varied
employments through different parts of regional Victoria, and the schooling of
Edward known within the family as Ted was haphazard. Dyson left school at the
age of twelve to work with his father as a travelling salesman, and in his
teenage years played a significant role in supporting the family, which
included two brothers, Ambrose and Will, who were talented artists. In the
early 1880s the family settled in South Melbourne, where Edward Dyson went to
work at an uncle’s factory.
From
the mid-1880s, Dyson began to submit stories and occasional pieces to the
Melbourne press, and later to the increasingly influential Sydney newspaper The
Bulletin, where he found early success when his story The Golden Shanty
appeared as the main piece in the 1889 Christmas issue. Dyson sympathised with
the nationalist and labour-oriented politics of the Bulletin, and in 1890
founded his own similar journal, the Bull-Ant, which attempted to emulate the
success of the Sydney publication. After this journal folded in 1892, Dyson
continued to make regular contributions to the Bulletin and other newspapers,
earning a comfortable living through the 1890s as a freelance writer.
Dysons
first collection of poetry, Rhymes from the Mines and Other Lines, was
published in 1896 by Angus and Robertson. Most of the poems had previously
appeared in the Bulletin, and were generally verse narratives in the bush
ballad style extremely popular at the time. Many of Dysons ballads were set in
mining and rural districts, similar to the places where he had grown up, and
they typically focussed on the experiences of prospectors and other bush
workers. Similar settings and themes informed Dysons copious output of short
stories, and later his novels, the most famous of which was the goldfields saga
In the Roaring Fifties (1906).
Dyson
kept up a regular literary output for much of his life, and continued to
contribute poems and stories to the Bulletin until the mid-1920s. A second
poetry collection Hello, Soldier!: Khaki Verse was published in 1919, and seems
to have been a belated attempt to capitalise on the wartime popularity of
vernacular digger verse, of which the best known exponent was C. J. Dennis .
Dyson contracted encephalitis in 1919, leaving him in a debilitated state
during his later years. He died at his home in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood
on 22 August 1931. Although a highly successful writer in his day, Dyson has
since been overshadowed by contemporaries like Henry Lawson and A. B. Paterson,
and also by the achievements of his brother Will Dyson, one of the leading
political cartoonists of the early twentieth century.
