George Augustine Taylor was born in Sydney, the son of a native-born fruiterer. After completing his education at the Marist Brothers' St Mary's High School and Sydney Technical College, he trained as a builder and was manufacturing a cement plaster by 1900. During this time he also contributed cartoons to local newspapers like the Bulletin and the Worker and he was reportedly the first Australian artist to be accepted by London Punch. Throughout the 1890s he mixed with Sydney's Bohemian set and was a member of that fraternity's Dawn and Dusk Club, memories of which were recorded in Those Were the Days (1918).
Fascinated by technology, Taylor experimented with wireless transmission and aviation. In 1909, he designed and piloted the first glider in Australia and in 1910 he founded the Wireless Institute of News South Wales. He subsequently joined the Australian military forces as an expert in aeronautics and wireless technology, ultimately devising strategies for locating submarines during World War One. In the 1920s Taylor traveled overseas to study broadcasting methods and he was a significant figure in the establishment of broadcasting regulations in Australia. He was also a television pioneer, successfully transmitting sketches by wireless in the mid 1920s.
Taylor's activities were supported by a publishing enterprise that produced a number of periodicals and books. In 1898 he edited the short-lived Ha! Ha!: A Merry Newspaper Magazine for Australians and in 1902 he published The Christmas Swag, a collection of verse and short stories. By 1907 he and his wife, architect Florence Taylor, had established several technical journals, including the Construction and Local Government Journal, Australasian Engineer, Radio Journal of Australia and Building: The Magazine for the Architect, Builder, Property Owner and Merchant. Taylor also published the weekly newspaper, Soldier, for the Returned Soldiers' Association of New South Wales, which continued until 1925 when it was absorbed into the Australian Home.
Taylor's company, Building Ltd., subsequently printed and published his more general writing.Chief among these were two travel books There! A Pilgrimage of Pleasure (1916) and The Ways of the World which detailed the Taylors' architecture tours to the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. Building Ltd. also published Taylor's novel The Schemers (1914), two collections of verse, Songs for Soldiers (1913) and Just Jingles (1922), and Caricature: Its Humorous Story in 15 Doses (1913). He expressed his political and nationalist ideas most strongly in a fictional narrative, The Sequel: What the Great War Will Mean to Australia (1915).
Taylor's many achievements concealed the epilepsy from which he suffered all his life. In January 1928 he drowned in the bath at his Sydney home as a result of an epileptic seizure.
