He was the youngest son of tenant farmer and Wesleyan lay preacher Jason Withers and his second wife, Elizabeth née Hendy, who died in 1929.

[2] After he and James Ellis bought a farm of 6,000 acres (2,428 ha), Withers sold it to him and moved to Pietermaritzburg, where he worked as a journalist and learned to set type in Dutch and English.

Austin McCallum, in Withers' entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, said that he "proved a fluent and scholarly journalist" and added "appealing humour" to his reporting.

[3] Endeavoring to write a history of Ballarat, Withers spent five years researching and contacting surviving squatters, mining pioneers and those involved with the Eureka Rebellion.

[1] Eureka Rebellion participant Montague Miller wrote that during the event, "[Withers] was continually over all the diggings, securing each day and being fully informed on every incident of importance for his daily paper.

"[4] One of the first major accounts of the Eureka Rebellion,[5] Kent Ball, a librarian at the State Library Victoria, described A History of Ballarat as a "classic research resource".

[7][8] According to historian Clare Wright, the History first perpetuated the myth that the Australian goldfields were exclusively male, despite this only applying to the earlies days of the gold rush.

[9] He wrote two novels which were widely serialized: Eustace Hopkins (1882), which won second place in a competition of 120 sponsored by The Age, and The Westons (1883), which was published in the Melbourne World and Federal Australian.

Withers died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 14 July 1913 in Dulwich Hill and was buried at Rookwood Cemetery, leaving his estate of £90 to Mary Ann Dusatoy.

Withers died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 14 July 1913 in Dulwich Hill and was buried at Rookwood Cemetery, leaving his estate of £90 to Mary Ann Dusatoy.