Irene Gough came to South Australia at the age of two. As a young girl she was asked to be children's editor of a paper in Adelaide, and as 'Possum' of 'Possum's Page' she came to edit the children's pages of the Mail and the News. She married Dennis Royston Hall, a teacher who went on to edit the NSW School Magazine, and they had four children. Gough's writing was mainly done for her children, much of it about things that featured in their lives, and after the death of her youngest son, Roger, at nineteen, she stopped writing.

Gough lived at different times at Taylorville on the Murray (on a converted paddle-wheeler), at Angas Plains near Strathalbyn, at Merna Merna near Leigh Creek in the dry north of South Australia, in Stirling the Adelaide Hills, and at Port Clinton and Wallaroo on Yorke Peninsula. She printed verse in the Bulletin, wrote short stories and verse for the Education Departments of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and was also published overseas. Gough was associated with the Jindyworobak movement, and was regularly featured in the Jindyworobak Anthologies, 1947-1953. She won the Rigby Centenary Prize for her children's novel The Magic Potato, which was never published. Another book, The Fourth Goat Had Wings, about a family goose called Gandhi who thought he was a goat, also appears not to have been published.