After a few years he became restless, and in 1884 sailed for Australia, where he became a reporter on the Brisbane Telegraph in its shipping, commercial and racing departments.

In 1887, after disagreements with the Telegraph management, Gould went to Sydney and worked on the Referee as "Verax", its horse-racing editor.

In 1891 his first novel, With the Tide, was published in book form in England under the title of The Double Event and was an immediate success; it sold over 100,000 copies in its first ten years and was still in print in 1919.

[2] Nat Gould was buried at Bradbourne in Derbyshire on 29 July 1919, and his grave is marked by a stone cross near the churchyard gates.

(Other authors who wrote racing stories in this period included Leslie Charteris, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Ellery Queen, Damon Runyon, Somerville and Ross, Edgar Wallace and John Welcome).