George McIver indicated that he was born near Aultbea, in Scotland, on 3 June, 1859. He came to Australia with his family as a young boy. According to the preface of A Drover's Odyssey, from the age of sixteen, he spent eight years working as a drover and bushman, travelling over large areas of Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory. By the 1890s he turned to school teaching, spending part of the decade at various New South Wales country schools - Corindi (near Woolgoolga), Macksville, the Clarence River, Nambucca, and Gulgamree (near Mudgee).
Official records indicate McIver married Emma Eugene Reid in Sydney in 1891, and that in the following years they had three children. Emma died (aged 23), at Gulgamree, in December 1894. In the earlier 20th century McIver appears to have spent a decade or so at Kempfield, a grazing property near Carcoar. By 1943 he appears to have been living at Katoomba with his daughter.
During World War I, McIver visited Britain, and in March 1916 he was a passenger on the ferry S.S. Sussex when it was torpedoed by a German U-Boat in the English Channel. During the 1930s McIver wrote numerous articles on his life in the bush for the Sydney Morning Herald and other newspapers, some of which were later published in A Drover's Odyssey. One of his sons, George McIver junior, served in the 3rd Battalion AIF and was wounded at Gallipoli.
