George Loyau was apprenticed to an auctioneer and surveyor in England before sailing to Australia in 1853. For his first seven years in Australia he travelled widely in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, working variously as a gold digger, shepherd, hut-keeper, shearer, overseer, stockman, drover, cook, tutor and journalist.
Loyau's journalistic and editorial career consisted largely of short spans of work in newspapers and covered four colonies. Between 1861 and 1865 he worked on the Queensland newspapers Burnett Argus, Gayndah (1861), the Maryborough Chronicle (four months later) and the Queensland Daily Guardian, Brisbane (1862) largely in editorial roles. In 1865 he moved to Sydney, doing newspaper and clerical work. Here he also published three volumes of poetry. Leaving Sydney, he became editor of the Gundagai Times for six months, then moved to Melbourne as a ticket writer and journalist.
In 1877 Loyau moved to Adelaide. He edited the Gawler Bunyip in 1878-1879 and launched the short-lived The Australian Family Herald: A Weekly Magazine of Interesting Literature, which apparently ran to only three issues. He edited Frearson's Weekly Illustrated, and with Maude Jeanne Franc made an attempt to establish an ongoing South Australian Christmas Annual. Depasquale (A Critical History of South Australian Literature 1836-1930, p. 104) notes that Loyau's own work featured very largely in the works he edited.
As well as his journalistic work, Loyau published during this time his fictionalised autobiography The Personal Adventures of George E. Loyau (1883), The Gawler Handbook (1880) and two biographical collections , The Representative Men of South Australia (1883) and Notable South Australians (1885). In 1895 he was back in Queensland , where he published The History of Maryborough~ in 1897. These later books have proved to be a valuable historical resource and have outlived the popularity of his verse.
