Hector Dinning served at Gallipoli, in France and in the Middle East during World War I. In the Fruitful Granite he describes the life he led in the four years before the war as 'an academic life (and a very interesting life of its kind), interspersed with coaching and free-lance journalism of a sporadic sort'. His occupation was described as Teacher on his enlistment in the AIF in 1914. After the war 'impatient with a life indoors' he became an orchadist near Stanthorpe, Queensland. During the 1920s, Dinning held a position as a tutor at the University of Queensland. In the 1930s and 1940s Dinning was a journalist with the Telegraph in Brisbane.
Dinning's non-fiction works include Nile to Aleppo : With the Light Horse in the Middle East (1920).