Poynton was the eleventh child in a family of fourteen. He was born at Illabrook, a mining township near Ballarat, where his parents had initially searched for gold but later took up land. Poynton moved to Melbourne at the age of fifteen where he became manager of the Midland Railway Company. Moving to Western Australia, he was Lord Mayor of Perth for several years. Poynton's first wife, Minnie Teather, died in 1934; later, he married Nina Jackson, thirty years his junior, the daughter of the chairman of West Australian Newspapers. He published six short stories in the
Bulletin in 1898 and 1899, some under the pseudonym of 'Dargo'. The biographical note in
The Bulletin Story Book (1901) describes him as an unmarried railway clerk 'of Australian race' with an English father and a Northern Irish mother.
