[3] His parents married on 11 May 1878 in Melbourne and on 20 May 1895 his mother petitioned for a divorce from her husband on the grounds of desertion, drunkenness and cruelty.
Mr Joyce was discharged from the company in which they were acting, and while she went to Auckland it was arranged that he should go to Melbourne, where their two children were living with the partitioner's mother.
[4] In 1895 his mother married again in Melbourne and the young Joyce took the name of his stepfather and became known as John Gordon Brandon.
As a molasses merchant in Sussex Street and on the Parramatta River at Mortlake Gordon Joyce-Brandon later owned the Claud Hamilton designed block of mansion flats Tennyson House in Darlinghurst.
[15] The Joyce-Brandon's owned Resthaven on Scotland Island and a house on Thyra Road, Palm Beach before dying at their residence in Lane Cove.
There are several newspaper reports around this time of English touring companies performing plays by Brandon in Australia.
[20] His first, The Survivor's Secret featured Ronald Sturges Vereker Purvale, a popular crime-fighter who went by the name 'RSVP'.
[21] His first marriage broke up and his wife returned to Australia with their young son, but their daughter Lillian, who later wrote under the name of Grania Brandon stayed with her father.
John Arnold from the School of Languages, Literature, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University has written about the careers of the Australian expatriate writers, John Gordon Brandon and Robert Coutts Armour, better known as Coutts Brisbane, bringing them to a current Australian readership.