AustLit

S. W. Powell had verse published in the English magazine Temple Bar at the age of seventeen. This was followed by a guide book to Durban, South Africa, where he lived as a child. Powell served in the Boer War before arriving in Australia. He joined the army and was sent to Thursday Island where he began writing under the pseudonym, Wyben. He left Australia in 1908 and travelled to New Zealand and Tahiti before returning to Australia and enlisting in the AIF. He landed at Gallipoli, was wounded and invalided back to England in 1916. Declared unfit for active service, Powell returned to Sydney via Tahiti at the end of the war. In the 1920s he traded in the Tuamotu Archipelago and worked for the Commonwealth public service. He returned to England in 1925. The Sydney publisher, N. S. W. Bookstall Company, published his works prior to his departure. Some of the seventeen novels he wrote between 1920 and 1937 have South Pacific or Australian characters, settings or themes.