Descended from generations of artists, and himself an art student before the outbreak of World War I, Hall arrived in Australia as a 'very young and very disillusioned ex-soldier of the first World War' (Outback Policeman, p. 1). He worked as a jackaroo in Western Australia and as a pearl fisher out of Broome before moving to the Northern Territory and enlisting for the Mounted Police in 1924. He lived in the Northern Territory for forty years, twenty years of them with the Mounted Police, spending time in remote stations including Tennant Creek, Pine Creek and Maranboy, and was involved in the Caledon Bay murders of 1932, which he later wrote about in his Dreamtime Justice (1962). He was injured in the first bombing raid on Darwin in 1942, resigned from the Police Force in 1943 and served with the army until 1945.

After being demobilised he worked as an artist until semi-blindness caused by an earlier injury made this impossible, then determined to support himself by his writing. He had shorts, features and factual short stories published in the Australasian Post and The Australian Journal and published several books based on his experience in the Northern Territory and the people he worked with, using a fictional form in order to catch the interest of his readers, and writing with love, respect and admiration for the Aboriginal people. Hall also wrote the biography, Namatjira of the Aranda (1962). In his later years he was totally blind, and lived in Adelaide for about six years.