[8] At a 12-year-old he began to work as an assistant to a travelling draper (leading to the 1911 poem "Tommy the hawker") as well as various jobs "below and on top" in the Victorian and Tasmanian goldfields: Driving a whim horse at Ballarat, mining at Clunes and Bungaree, and panning shallow alluvial for gold at Lefroy, Tasmania, and on the Pinafore field, finding its largest nugget.

[2] He recorded many ideas and maintained a card index, that allowed him to reflect and refine the contents of his writing and produce such volumes.

[11] Acceptance of his writings allowed Dyson to leave the factory and earn his livelihood solely from his stories, verses, and paragraphs.

[12][2] The early 1890s also saw Dyson investing his savings into a weekly publication, The Bull Ant, produced with later-member of parliament Randolph Bedford (1868–1941) and cartoonist Tom Durkin (1853–1902).

[11] He was forced to close the paper after a Constable Cornelius Crowe successfully sued him for libel after being depicted cheerfully bludgeoning to death a helpless drunk.

[13] The year 1893 saw Dyson side with Lawson in a poetry slam on Banjo Paterson's bush idealism, as part of the Bulletin Debate, where he submitted the poem "The Fact of the Matter", which was later reworded and renamed "The drovers in reply".

In the same year appeared Fact'ry 'Ands, a series of more or less connected sketches dealing with factory life in Melbourne in a vein of humour.

[15] It was to the point of publication in January 1919, a few months before Dyson's personal health significantly impacted his capability to work due to the global Spanish flu.

[16] The anthology was well received as showing "his remarkable ability in seizing the soldier's point of view, and his dexterous use of language, plain and colored".

[4] Dyson also did not rank in the top twelve of the 1914 Melbourne's Herald ballot of Australia's one hundred and ten favourite poets.

[21] By 1923 Edward Dyson was feeling weakened from an appendicitis operation,[8] which only added to his long illness resulting from the Australian 1919 influenza pandemic.