Edward Dyson was born at Morrison near Ballarat in 1865. He received an interrupted education as his family frequently moved in search of work. But his experience of growing up in the cultural milieu of miners and other small-town characters became a huge creative store for the short stories and poems he would write as an adult. Dyson's elaborate system of note-taking and record-keeping enabled him to maintain a considerable output of jokes, captions, stories and melodrama throughout his career, catering very successfully to the tastes of the reading public.
Dyson's first published pieces appeared in the Ballarat Courier. These were followed by publication in Australian Tit-Bits, Life and the Bulletin. Dyson's reputation was firmly established in 1889 when his short story 'A Golden Shanty' (which clearly reflects the racial intolerance of the day) was selected as the title piece in the Sydney Bulletin's Christmas anthology. From this time Dyson made a very comfortable living as a freelance writer, publishing a number of collections in addition to his newspaper work.
Dyson's poetry, 'under the influence of Bret Harte,' according to Colin Roderick, appeared in Rhymes from the Mines and Other Lines (1896). His goldfield material was published in fiction in Below and On Top (1898), The Gold-Stealers (1901) and In the Roaring Fifties (1906). He also drew on his work experience in factories, crafting an acute picture of Australian larrikinism, in Fact'ry 'Ands (1906), Benno and Some of the Push (1911) and Spats' Fact'ry (1914). His last published collection was The Golden Shanty (1929). Roderick considers Dyson's characters 'life-like, his treatment humourous and zestful.'
Dyson is the brother of Jean Lindsay (q.v.) and of Will Dyson (q.v.) (who often illustrated his older brother's works). Dyson married Dorothy Boyes in 1914 and appeared to be set for a comfortable life of financial stability, but an attack of encephalitis after the 1919 influenza outbreak caused a marked decline in his health and creative output. He died in 1931.
Dyson's work has received little substantial comment, but a number of stories, including 'A Golden Shanty', continue to be anthologised.
