Freelancing followed, verse, short stories and sketches, written while travelling in Australia searching for payable mining fields.

Three short novels appeared afterwards in the Bookstall series, Billy Pagan, Mining Engineer (1911), The Silver Star (1917) and Aladdin and the Boss Cockie (1919), the latter also adapted into a play in four acts.

He had also made a collection of his Bulletin verse in 1904, however the unbound sheets were all burned during a fire at the printers, except about six copies which were bound without title-page and apparently given to friends.

A few years before his death, Bedford stated that he did not regret the fire as some of the verses included "could only be excused on account of his extreme youth at the time of writing".

[2] With Australian authors Henry Lawson and Victor Daley et al., he was a member of the elite Dawn and Dusk Club.

[3] In 1923, he was elected as Labor candidate to the Queensland Legislative Assembly for Warrego, a seat which he held until his resignation in 1937 to contest the Division of Maranoa in the Australian House of Representatives.